


Shifting the Sun

by EasioniaDuring, Heavenward (PreludeInZ), PreludeInZ



Series: TAG DeviantAU [9]
Category: Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991), Thunderbirds
Genre: Family, Friendship, Gen, Recovery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-15
Updated: 2019-09-17
Packaged: 2019-09-18 17:08:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 34,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16999101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EasioniaDuring/pseuds/EasioniaDuring, https://archiveofourown.org/users/PreludeInZ/pseuds/Heavenward, https://archiveofourown.org/users/PreludeInZ/pseuds/PreludeInZ
Summary: Things are going well for John Tracy. Or they were, anyway.





	1. Robin

**Author's Note:**

> A brief note: 
> 
> I generally don't like to include writer's notes but for this specific story, I thought it necessary. I came across a story by PreludeinZ quite by accident, a story titled The Harvard Hypocrite, a Thunderbirds AU. This story has spawned a series of other stories (chronologically: The Harvard Hypocrite, Close Quarters, Good Fathers, Cream, No Sugar, and Shared Spaces). Shifting the Sun will be bit of a companion piece, picking up where Shared Spaces leaves off. (I'd recommend reading the other stories for context, but it's your call.)
> 
> The fact that I've written this story at all is a bit of a fluke, considering I don't normally take to anything AU and am not even particularly invested in the Thunderbirds bit of the internet. Long story short, I left a comment on The Harvard Hypocrite, Prelude and I got to talking, and now she's been very kind and helped me with my own rather odd contribution to the series.

 

 

A dinner meant tuxedos and speeches and microscopic canapés circling the perimeter on shiny trays. It meant people and drinks and networking opportunities, a slow, reverential circumambulation of the VIPs of the room. And it meant Scott had to endure a variety of yes-men trying to get into his good graces, into his father's good graces, and it was getting late, closer to the time when leaving a party wouldn't seem so much like ducking out but the rational decision of a sound mind. And Scott was just about to grab John and tell him that when Scott heard a voice through the haze of voices and the muted clink of champagne flutes.

"But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?" A mocking pause. "It is the east, and Scott Tracy is the sun."

Scott turned, and it took him a moment to put a name to the smug bastard sitting behind the green stretch of poker table, a glass by his elbow. Robin Locke—LA staple, tabloid darling—was casually shuffling a deck of cards, his loyal band of followers clustered behind him. "It's been an age," he said, offering a lopsided grin.

Not that Scott would be one to concede to a point but Robin was right: it had been an age, maybe even a lifetime because that's what Afghanistan had been, a universe unto itself. But Scott supposed if he were ever to run into Robin by accident, it would be here, at a high-stakes poker game in the backroom of a charity function.

Robin spread the cards in his hands. "Want to play?"

Scott hesitated, just for a second, because it was late and John should get home—but the pause was enough for Robin to shoot his friends a look. "I guess Boy Wonder here doesn't want to party with us plebs."

The others laughed.

Scott glanced at John and wondered if he remembered how much of an idiot Robin really was, and there was the smallest change in John's eyes, a barely imperceptible narrowing that meant he was definitely game. But they probably shouldn't. Robin was about as bright as a low-watt bulb. Taking his money wouldn't be fair, and this was when Scott, in his great benevolence, should show him mercy and move on.

"Surely you could step down from Olympus for an hour and grace us with your good looks," said Robin. "And your money."

"All right," said Scott. "But only if John gets to play."

Robin tilted his head at John. "Have a seat, stretch. Looks like you've got your big brother looking out for you."

The crowd around the table rearranged itself, making room for Scott and John, and Robin held out the deck to Scott. "You can shuffle," he said. "Make sure we're on the up-and-up." He thought he was being gracious.

Scott accepted the deck, the weight familiar in his hand. There was an art to the hustle: pretend to be awful too soon and Robin would know he was lowballing. So Scott opted for Virgil's utilitarian approach to card games: a quick, non-descript shuffle, the moderately confident technique of the everyman. He set the deck down in the middle of the table.

Robin dealt.

Scott picked up his cards, a quick glance at John. They didn't really have a baseline for Robin, but judging by experience, he shouldn't be too hard to figure out. After all, the guy was wearing blue at a black-tie event, a tailored, three-piece suit of slim, clean lines which told Scott what he already knew: Robin was an arrogant ass who didn't care about the rules.

"So when was the last time we saw each other?" said Robin. "And I mean, really looked into each other's eyes and saw the soul that burns within?"

"Hamptons?" Scott wasn't actually guessing. "John and I came to your party."

'Party' sounded innocuous for what it had been. One of those beery ragers only the rich kids of the Hamptons could throw, kind of like an Ent gathering but for douchebags. It had been John's last summer before Kansas U, and Scott had managed to coax him out from behind his book for a last hurrah, which had admittedly been more about Scott than John.

"Oh yeah," said Robin, the memory coming back to him. "That was, what, six years ago?"

They had seen each other around after that, of course, lives casually overlapping at high-profile functions where their fathers had been invited and the sons had tagged along. But the last significant memory Scott had of Robin was at that party, drunk and distant and obnoxious, head of his posse of like-minded fratheads. And apparently not much had changed.

Robin gestured for a refill to his empty glass. "The Hamptons," he mused. "You see, I remember that. I remember you. Don't remember your brother though, but…" he nodded at John, "…who does?"

Scott felt more than saw John shift beside him, the slightest movement, halfway to a flinch, and whatever doubts Scott had about blindly disliking Robin flickered out. They were going to run the table in rings around him.

::::

Robin was losing. Scott put it down to Robin's three drinks that he couldn't tell he was being played. John put it down to base stupidity. They were both probably right. Not that either of them needed to consult with each other on the subject, or at least not by anything more than brief glances and near imperceptible changes of expression. Scott and John had been brothers for a quarter of a century. John was newly twenty-five. Scott had a degree in mathematics and five years in the air force behind him, and he could read the deck just as easily as he could read the other players, though he read neither of these as easily as his little brother, after knowing him for twenty-five years. At his best, John played cards the same way the Devil plays the fiddle, as though there were souls at stake.

And God help anyone on the other side of the table.

They could both do the requisite math for the game itself, easily, but it was John's lead Scott followed through the metagame. Scott was good at the immediacy of each hand and its odds, he knew that a Queen-King Suited weren't as good as they looked, and equally knew that his opponents mostly didn't know that. Robin certainly didn't. But the cards on the table only represented half the game being played, and by far the less interesting half. There was a bigger picture to be seen, measurements of probability and behavior, of chip counts and betting structure and just damn good card sense. There was more to poker than math, and John had always had a particular penchant for game theory.

Scott threw away a pair of aces on his brother's infinitely subtle instruction, folding in theatrical disgust and telling John he was a rat bastard. The next hand he drove the betting recklessly higher to eliminate one of Robin's cronies, and then watched his brother clean the idiot out with nothing better than three of a kind. The game being played with the cards was so simple a drunk could follow it. The game being played with the players was so complex and subtle that Scott stayed resolutely sober to appreciate it fully. It was artful and elegant and brilliant, and it made Scott's chest swell with warm pride for his little brother as John neatly pared the table down to just the three of them, two against one.

The best part was that Robin still thought he was winning. To be fair, he wasn't entirely wrong. He had more chips than anyone else; he'd taken the pot that cleared another of his lackeys—but not as many as Scott and John together. He had assumed that the way Scott and John had been sniping at each other across the table was just brotherly bickering, but Robin didn't have any siblings and couldn't possibly hear the conversation coded into the casual exchange of insults.

"This town ain't big enough for the three of us," said Scott, exaggerating a Texan drawl, arching an eyebrow and inquiring of his brother whether they should drive Robin out first and then enjoy the last of the game themselves, or whether one of them should have the exclusive pleasure of kicking his ass.

"I suppose midnight is pretty much the same thing as high noon," John murmured in answer and passed the deck over to Scott for his deal. "Your turn," he said lightly, the sort of unnecessary comment that translated to permission for Scott to finish the game himself, and that he'd rather end it sooner than later, and not draw it out any longer than necessary. The next round or two would probably see some reckless betting on John's part, enough to throw the chip-lead in Scott's direction, and to set him up for a head's up game that would finish Robin properly.

Scott had been given permission to take the gloves off, and the cards came alive in his hands. He executed a flashy waterfall shuffle, then spread the cards into a perfect arc across the table, tipped the ace at the end up and let the cards fall along a line like dominoes. He swept the deck back up, performed a nimble one-hand cut, and then another simple riffle shuffle to finish. Robin's mouth opened slightly in surprise and he stared in a kind of numb befuddlement at the cards that landed in front of him.

Scott dealt the first of what would be a series of losing hands. "Thanks for the invite, Robin." He was being blithely insincere. "I'd say it's been fun, but it's been about as fun as go-fish with a four-year-old."

"That seems uncharitable to four-year-olds," John remarked and anted in with a cool ten thousand dollars. His own highball glass of cranberry juice and vodka had been nursed along slowly for the duration of the game, still half-full, and would likely remain that way until he decided to go out.

Robin lost all the ease from earlier. "We're not done yet," he said, pushing twenty thousand dollars' worth of chips into the pot, a reckless raise before he even looked at his cards. "Maybe your math is off."

Scott chuckled and followed the raise, waited as John did the same, and Robin peeked at his cards, blanched momentarily, then checked. Scott dealt the flop and as soon as his eyes met John's across the table, he knew exactly what his brother had. "Actually," said Scott, "I have a degree in Mathematics, summa cum laude from Yale. Johnny's got a Master's in Computer Science from the hallowed halls of the University of Kansas. You've been losing since you agreed to play the pair of us, Robin. We're not playing poker. We're playing you."

It was hard to get a laugh out of John at the best of times, but now and again there was this way his eyes would light up, a way he'd smile. It was better and more refined than anything as coarse as laughter, and reserved exclusively for people who knew him best. He smiled exactly that sort of smile across the table as he said, light and casual, "More to poker than money. And more to poker than math. Knowing the math is the easy part. Usually the hard part is knowing the people you're playing with. But the problem with you is—there's not much to know. Arrogant. Drunk. As bad at the math as you are with your money, or you'd know better than to play cards with any single member of our family. Never mind the two of us at once."

"Not that it would have taken the two of us," Scott added.

Robin downed the rest of his drink, and Scott could read his irritation. "Just play."

John shrugged. "We almost don't really have to." His fingertips tapped his two cards lightly, and he went on, "I've got jack-ten, suited. Now if I take my paltry thirty grand and go all-in, like so—"

His chips slid across the felt into the middle of the table, and suddenly the money in the pot totaled up to more than Robin's hundred grand. He flipped his cards over, revealed his Jack-Nine, both spades. The flop made this eighty-percent of a straight already, and John had excellent odds. Scott had a dependable two pair, queens and kings, but he had already decided to throw this hand in John's direction, as soon as he deals the turn. There were no aces anywhere in evidence yet, and Robin certainly didn't have them. "—then my brother's going to call, because he's got two pair, king high."

Scott inclined his head in a gracious nod and called. The pot now sat at an even hundred grand, and Robin had made the mistake of including his own ante in his total—but those chips were already forfeit. It would cost him another thirty grand to stay in the game, would take a bite out of his bank that totaled up to fifty thousand dollars. For the first time, he picked his cards up and stared at them, as though actually attempting to do the math he'd been told so much about. "And that will drive the pot up, so it'll cost you if you want to keep playing."

John had folded his hands on the table, leaning forward in a slightly predatory fashion. "Now, what you've got is a longshot for a flush," he informed Robin, as though Robin didn't already know, and as though he didn't startle when John told him exactly what he was hoping for. "You've got two hearts, lowish, because you overplay when you get overconfident, and you don't seem to realize why a flush is the fifth most valuable hand in the game. If those were my cards, I'd fold them. But I'm reasonably sure you won't listen to me."

Scott knew John well enough to know that his little brother was attempting to be merciful, to teach Robin a lesson by telling him what he should do and why he should do it. Scott knew Robin better than John did, and he knew this would, without a doubt, backfire.

Robin's fingers tightened around his cards. "You don't know what I have."

John shrugged, apparently indifferent. "Call, then."

"You don't know anything about me." There was a new heat in Robin's tone.

Scott glanced at John, but his brother didn't seem cowed in the slightest. Across the table from Robin, Scott's little brother was nothing but cool, effortless disdain. "All I need to know," John answered, speaking slowly and deliberately, as though he was talking to someone with a recent head injury, "is that you're lousy at cards."

"Oh, piss off."

John was unruffled. "Then play."

Robin pushed more money into the middle of the table, a mound of chips, enough money to buy a house. And Scott couldn't help but shake his head. It was easy, sure, but it wasn't supposed to be this easy. His gaze drifted to the collection of empty glasses beside Robin. He felt a twinge of guilt and his own poker face slipped just slightly. He hesitated, toying with his chips. Just four, five thousand each, his last twenty grand. His odds weren't as good as John's, but they were better than Robin's. Scott folded. He had twenty grand, which was less than what he bought in with, but more than what Robin's going to take home tonight. "I'm out. Robin?"

"Just deal the damn cards, Tracy."

So Scott did.

It took Robin a solid ten seconds to fully appreciate he'd lost the hand. He was never going to win. He had a four and a nine of hearts, and John a straight flush, king high, all spades. It didn't clear him out, but it was obvious that the game was over. Functionally, mercifully, it was almost a tie. Robin had been whittled back down to the value of his original buy-in, the thirty grand that every other player had brought to the table. This would be the best place to end the game.

Scott was already picking up his chips, tacitly removing himself from play. John got to his feet, leaning forward to gather up his winnings from the pot.

Robin threw his cards down. "You Tracys think you own the world."

"Don't we, John?" said Scott, grinning. "It sure feels like it."

Robin grimaced. "Scott Tracy, perpetual golden boy, the flying ace." He paused. "And John—the Harvard has-been."

John froze.

"You didn't think that secret would keep, did you?" Robin's smile was slow. "It's the scoop of the century. Or at least since Gordon's infamous birthday bash. One Tracy was an anomaly. Two is a pattern." Robin leaned forward on his elbows. "Are you high right now? Is that how you won? A little something to sharpen the edge?"

And in the silence that fell, Scott wished Robin had just hit John instead. The expression on John's face was stricken, awful, heartbreaking. Scott couldn't believe he'd allowed this to happen, that he'd been stupid enough to bring his little brother into the toxic presence of Robin Locke.

No one was supposed to know. Scott wasn't even sure how the hell Robin possibly could, except that Robin trafficked in gossip of the worst, most malicious sort, given his own sordid history with the tabloids. Maybe it was a guess off a credible rumor, grown from a kernel of truth about the way John had been at Harvard, been  _successful_  at Harvard, and had left, abruptly and without warning.

Scott was frozen, just the same as John, because he didn't know what to do. Any reaction seemed like a trap.

Robin had never been one to let a silence stretch too long. "You have to admit, John, this is pretty big. Gordon was an idiot. You're not. Kinda ruins the image, doesn't it? That spotless Tracy image. Probably why your old man hushed it up. How did he figure it anyway? You trip out at Christmas dinner or something?"

John had come a long way in six months. Six months of sobriety, six months of recovery, six months of slowly, carefully rebuilding his entire self, sorting through the wreckage of the life that had come crashing down around him, dusting off the parts that were still good, fitting them back into his own foundation. John wasn't exactly back to his old self—but his new self was sturdier in some ways, had acquired a quiet strength of someone who'd gone through hell and come out the other side.

A comment about Harvard six months ago would've been enough to break him into pieces, would've had him stumbling from the room in a state approaching panic, convinced the world was coming apart and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

Now, Scott watched his brother lift his chin slightly, set his jaw, the bright green eyes flicking over Robin, taking him in, really and properly, reading him like he'd read the cards when they were still on the table. "At least my father cared enough to stop me."

There was a split second when Scott saw Robin's jaw set before Robin lunged forward, grabbed John by the shirt, and the entire room seemed to freeze. Scott didn't remember standing because time blinked between one moment and the next, and all he knew was that someone had laid hands on a member of his family, some hardwired instinct came flaring back to life. He could see where Robin's grip tightened on John's collar, the way his brother had frozen with a few chips between his fingers, the way Robin's cronies clustered by the bar in the corner of the room, too far away to be considered threats, too close to be discounted.

Robin looked at Scott, the surprise registering slowly in his glassy eyes, as though he'd just remembered John had brought his big brother. This was good, because John's big brother was about to put a fist through Robin's teeth if he didn't let go of him in three seconds.

It took less time than that. Something in Robin changed, a crack in his anger, and maybe it was because the room had gone silent, and all heads had turned, and he was just the cliché of the drunk picking a fight he couldn't win. Because he let go, and John stumbled back, stricken, startled but not hurt, and for the barest moment after, Scott's blood was up, fists clenched, and he had to tell himself to  _breathe, Scott_  because Robin was drunk and stupid, and Scott shouldn't kick a man when he was down. Even if they were bastards like Robin Locke.

Robin adjusted the cuffs of his dark blue suit. The arrogance was back, the articulated swagger, everything that had made Scott want to sit down and take every last cent of his money in the first place. Suddenly it felt like the card game had been the best way they could have picked to lose. And maybe Robin had somehow guessed this too, because he grinned. "Big, scary Scott Tracy. Always just a little too late to do any good."

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A big thanks to Prelude, who had a very real 'hold my beer' moment when bashing out the poker scene. She can write poker, I can't.


	2. Scott

 

 

 

Six months ago, John would have broken down before Robin was even out of the room. But now, six months on, they made it as far as the hotel lobby before Scott realized John wasn't keeping it together. He should have seen it. There were a hundred little things to let him know: John had stopped talking, steps quick, gaze rigid, fixed on the next exit. From the door, out of the anteroom where they'd played poker, through the ballroom where they'd attended a party in their father's stead, into the hallway, down the hallway, into the elevator—Scott should have known in the elevator from the way John paced the perimeter.

They reached the ground floor. The elevator dinged and the doors slid open and John slipped through the gap in the doors before Scott could react. "John! Stop!"

But John was already sprinting across the polished marble floor of the lobby, and he didn't hear him or couldn't. He reached the glass doors of the lobby and pushed them open because he had the  _flight_  to his big brother's  _fight_ , and because six months on, recovering, with Gordon keeping a sharp eye on his health and fitness, John could  _run_.

Scott tore after him, bursting through the lobby doors to the courtyard outside, crowded with limos and driverless taxis and luxury cars. It was Thursday night, but this was LA, and there were people everywhere—valets and guests and guards and tourists and—

A car horn went off, a sharp blast. "Get out of the way, kid!"

John was in the middle of the traffic, lost, erratic, drawing attention, and Scott went after him before anyone said anything else. He darted into the fray and snagged John by the elbow, the collar of his suit jacket, and hauled him back to the sidewalk in front of the hotel doors.

John tripped on the slight step or his legs gave out, and he collapsed on the pavement. Scott followed him down, and John doubled over, gasping painfully, clinging to the front of Scott's jacket, hands twisting desperately around a fistful of fabric. Scott gently eased John's hold, readjusted, one arm wrapped around John's shoulders and a hand to his chest.

" _Easy_ , Johnny. I'm here. It's me, it's just Scott." And then, though it didn't count for much, he squeezed John's shoulder and added a little helplessly, "I've got you."

It took a few more gasping breaths before John managed, "Scott—can't…can't  _breathe_. Can't—I  _can't_ , I—" His voice was swallowed in the next desperate bid for breath.

"You  _can_ ," Scott corrected gently. "You've gotta breathe through it, J."

John  _did_  try. But he broke off halfway, choking on another sob. He was starting to hyperventilate, and Scott resisted the impulse to hold him tighter, eased off but remained sitting, turning towards the sound of footsteps behind him.

They were drawing attention. One of the porters approached, trailed by a neatly uniformed security guard. Maybe this wasn't their first time to have a guest lose it on the hotel curb. Maybe the breakdowns of the rich and famous were run of the mill, but at least the men had the decency to be cautious.

"Do you need an ambulance, sir?" said the porter.

When John heard that he let out a moan in protest and let go of Scott's jacket, bowing so low his forehead nearly scraped the pavement, and wrapped his arms around his chest, fingers digging so deep into his arms they'd leave a bruise in the morning.

"No," said Scott with the kind of definitive weight he used with people accustomed to taking orders. "He's my brother. This is a panic attack. It'll pass. I'll handle him. Right now I need not to be crowded, or he'll get worse." He almost didn't need to say it; the security guard had already shooed away the threatening cluster of curious bystanders, directing traffic away from this end of the sidewalk. But Scott felt better for saying it because it felt like the only thing he could do to help.

The guard summoned a dark, low-slung luxury car over. It pulled obediently to the curb, angling itself in such a way that it blocked off the rest of the courtyard and its prying eyes. This accomplished, he discretely squared himself up a respectful distance away to keep the crowds away, murmuring something into the radio clipped to his collar.

The porter too seemed genuinely concerned one of his patrons was sobbing on the pavement. "Can I do anything to help, sir?"

Scott had a fondness for people who made themselves useful. He put a hand to the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out his phone, thumb plying across the slot in the back. The business card slid out, matte grey like the winter sky, with his TI contact information embossed into the surface. He extended it to the porter. "Call this number. You'll get my personal secretary. Tell her to send a driver to this address—Jasper, if he's available —along with someone to collect the car we came in."

"Of course, sir."

Scott nodded, turning back to John, tight and worried that John was still breathing hard and shallow, mumbling something incoherent. Scott was uneasy, a tightness spreading across his chest because John wasn't breathing right, and Scott wasn't good at this. But at least he knew someone who was. He flipped his phone in his hand and unlocked the screen, scrolling to find Gordon, and sent a quick text:

[Scott: john vs panic attack? help?]

It was late, past midnight, and even if he was in the same time zone, Gordon was still an early-to-bed, early-to-rise type of person. Scott had already figured this for a long shot, but his phone vibrated sharply in his hand, only a few seconds later.

[Gordon: ahh fuck really? goddammit hes been doing so well]

[Gordon: is he actually in the middle of an attack right now?]

[Scott: y]

[Gordon: shit. there's a pillbox on his keychain. get it out or actually tell him to get it out and there's one pill inside.]

[Gordon: make him take it but tell him he's gotta bite it in half before he swallows.]

Scott probably should have known that, but at this point he was just thankful for a clear directive. "John. Hey, Johnny—you hearing me?" Scott dropped his phone back into his pocket and moved his hand to John's shoulder, giving him a gentle squeeze. "John, I need you to work with me. Where's your pill case?"

John didn't seem to hear him.

"Johnny, your case.  _John_."

John sat up a little, fumbling in his pocket for his keys and keychain, a little brass case about an inch across with a J monogrammed into the black enameled top. The task seemed to help, and by the time the porter returned with a bottle of water and the news that the driver was on his way, John was better. He'd taken the pill, and the attack seemed to be ebbing. Scott let out a deep breath. It had only been about ten minutes but it had felt like an hour, and if  _he_  was worn down, John had to be wrung out and exhausted.

"Thanks." Scott accepted the bottle of water from the porter and twisted the cap off before handing it to his brother. John's hand were shaking and he had to take small sips, but it seemed to help.

Everything Scott could think to do seemed like too much to ask, so they stayed where they were, seated side by side on the pavement, until one of the company cars arrived, sleek and silver, sliding in to take the place of the low black sedan. The door opened and Jasper got out, dapper in his black suit and cap. They had always had a driver. It was part of Dad's philosophy—part of TI's philosophy—to hire people to positions that could be automated. Technically, Jasper could have been replaced: half the cars in the courtyard were driverless, and the half that had drivers had hardcoded AI. But in this particular moment, watching Jasper jog around the front of the car and pull open the rear passenger door, Scott had never been so glad their father had a preference for the personal touch. Jasper was John's driver, at least informally, and he'd been shuttling him all over LA for the duration of his 'internship' at Tracy Industries.

Scott stood up, brushing off the seat of his three thousand dollar pants. John didn't move. Whatever he'd taken had smoothed out the ragged edges of his anxiety into a mild disconnect. Valium, Scott guessed. Maybe Xanax. Probably should have asked, but it didn't seem to matter now.

"John, we gotta head home." Scott gently nudged his brother in the hip with the toe of a shiny black oxford. "Our ride's here."

John unfolded stiffly, and Scott helped him up, and Jasper bounded forward with the practiced ease of a professional, catching John's elbow when he staggered slightly, waving Scott off. There was a protectiveness there as he helped John to the car, getting him safely settled in the back seat.

Scott turned to the porter, still waiting anxiously nearby. "Thank you," Scott said again, and it didn't feel like enough. He held out his hand to shake and pretended not to see when the man first wiped his palm on his pant leg before taking his hand. The man was nervous now, after he'd seen the business card. The Tracy name had a certain kind of pull in LA. Had a certain kind of pull anywhere, really.

"Of course, Mr. Tracy." The porter very nearly bowed. "I hope your brother recovers quickly."

The formality of the exchange was a little foreign to Scott, and he tried to take the edge off with a brief nod and a smile, "Already on the mend, seems like. He's a little high-strung and we had a long night. He'll be fine after he gets some sleep. I'll thank you again for your discretion. If you'd be so kind as to leave me your manager's name, I'd like to put in a good word, Mr.—?"

"Little, sir."

There was a joke to be made about that, but Scott didn't make it. He only nodded, saluting him informally, two fingers off the top of his non-existent cap. "Thank you, Mr. Little," he said and climbed into the car next to John. Jasper closed the door behind him, and Scott reached for a control panel and tinted the windows into opacity.

The car pulled away from the hotel, and everything was suddenly quiet, the noise of the traffic and the people and the party already far away and long ago. Jasper, as if sensing the need, turned the radio on, the soft, soothing jazz a comforting ripple in the stillness.

Just as Scott eased himself back into the seat, his phone buzzed in his pocket, and he pulled it out. Gordon again.

[Gordon: how's he doing?]

Scott glanced at John. He was watching the streetlights passing, humming something not even remotely in tune with the music.

[Scott: better. calmed down, kinda spacey.]

[Gordon: well, valium.]

[Scott: Yeah. We're going home, he's going to bed.]

[Gordon: roger dodger. tell him to call me tomorrow]

[Scott: will do. thanks for the assist.]

[Gordon: anytime, chief.]

"You think Dad'll let me go home?" John's voice was quiet.

Scott looked up. He didn't think John had been paying attention, fixated as he was on lights outside the window.

"Dad?" Scott echoed. John must have misunderstood something. "Dad's  _at_ home, waiting for us. We've got that, you know, the thing? The presentation or whatever. Tomorrow morning. Gotta go home and get some racktime, brother."

John tore his gaze away from the window to give Scott a puzzled stare. "No, I meant—I mean— _home_. Before it all goes to hell, I should…I should get a flight out tonight. Take T-1 if there's nothing commercial. Get out of LA. Go  _home_."

"Back to Kansas?" Scott frowned. "Why?"

"Because everyone knows I'm a drug addict."

Scott had to take a breath and let it out slowly. Robin Locke could go fuck himself. "Nobody knows anything, John."

"But Robin said—"

"He was drunk. No one's going to believe anything he says. What they heard— _if_  they heard anything at all—was Robin getting pissy because he lost at poker. Shouldn't be news to anyone that he's an idiot. If it's your word against his, who do you think would win?"

John turned back to the window. "But how did he  _know_?"

Scott was glad John couldn't see him wince. "It doesn't matter," he said, even if it wasn't true. "Robin Locke doesn't matter."

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter almost entirely written by Prelude. Editing and end of chapter by Easy


	3. Jeff

 

 

It was good to have his sons back in his day-to-day life again, though Jeff had forgotten just what it was like to wait up for them to get home from a late-night out. He sat in the living room, leafing through a copy of the  _Financial Times_  by the low light of a lamp beside the couch, trying not to worry, because there was nothing to worry about. Scott would have an eye on John and John would keep Scott out of trouble, and if Jeff didn't have an eye on either of them, then the next best case scenario would be the pair of them having an eye on each other.

It was past one AM when nature called, drawing Jeff away from his vigil in the living room for the bathroom. If he deliberately took his time and made a leisurely stop into his home office to send a quick email to kill a bit more time—well, it paid off because returning to the living room, he found John curled up in the warm place he'd left vacant on the couch. He'd kicked off a pair of black loafers, discarded a silk tie, but he was still in the suit he'd worn out to dinner. By all appearances, he'd also managed to go straight to sleep in the five minutes his father had been absent. There was no sign of Scott.

It was late but not  _that_  late. Jeff frowned as he crossed the living room, approached the couch and gently put a hand to his son's shoulder, giving him a slight shake. "John?" he said softly. "Johnny, where's your brother?"

John shifted slightly and blinked, and even in the low light, his green eyes were bright and liquid, a little unfocused. He looked up at his father like he didn't quite know what Jeff was doing here, in the living room of his very own apartment. He leaned forward to peer past him, finding the living room empty, and then shook his head. "Dunno," he answered and made to curl back up in the corner of the couch, though he drowsily went on to add, "Jasper drove."

Jasper was one of TI's drivers and the one who usually drove John around—but he and Scott had borrowed the Lamborghini for the night, and Scott wasn't here. Presumably, neither was the Lamborghini. And unless Jeff missed his guess, he was reasonably certain that his second son was drunk, or at least fairly tipsy. Possibly Scott had sent him home early. Possibly John's idea of a late night wasn't late enough for Scott, and Jeff's eldest son has decided to stay out.

But before he could even start to get irritated with Scott in his absence, there was the soft chime of the penthouse elevator, and Scott came striding down the hallway from the foyer and into the living room to speak for himself. Curled up on the couch, before Jeff could say anything, John let out a soft snore.

Jeff folded his arms across his chest and turned to face his eldest, the universal sign of his displeasure. He had seen Gordon's impersonation of him, the exaggerated puff of his chest, and Jeff tolerated this, but he was not currently inclined to tolerate whatever Scott had gotten up to this evening, if this evening's events had ended in bringing his little brother home, three sheets to the wind.

"Considering his existing issues with substance abuse," Jeff began, building slowly, "in future, I'd  _prefer it_  if you could refrain from getting your brother drunk. If he can't keep up with you, then don't take him out in the first place.  _Don't_  bring him home like  _this_. I've already told you both I expect you to join me for that presentation tomorrow morning. I'll be very embarrassed if I have to make your apologies on account of Thursday night hangovers."

Being the eldest, Scott was less susceptible to paternal theatrics than the rest of his brothers. He didn't even have the decency to come to anything like attention in the face of his father's disapproval, and was instead unbuttoning his shirt cuffs and loosening his tie, cool and calm and tolerant as he spoke, "He had half a vodka cranberry, a panic attack, and a Valium. We didn't mean to be out so late. We got…distracted."

That drained the fight right out of him. Jeff was predictable in his tendency to spoil for a fight, to enjoy a good argument, and if that occasionally resulted in unjust, undeserved and ultimately embarrassing tirades to his son—well, at least Scott was merciful enough to cut him off before he could really get started. Immediately the irritation became concern, and he turned back towards the couch, the context changing. John had come a long way. He wasn't out of the woods yet, and sometimes he snagged on the brambles, but he was trying. Jeff sighed and shook his head, "He's been doing so well."

"Wasn't his fault." Scott sat down on the couch beside his brother. He had already stuffed his tie in the front pocket of his jacket to keep his pocket square company. He started to lever his shoes off his feet but stopped, thinking the better of it, and instead sat forward leaning over to peer at his brother. He patted John's knee and looked up, plainly remorseful. "It was mine, I guess."

"What happened?"

Scott paused, hesitating. He didn't look away, because he knew better, and so Jeff could see the mental calculation. "Nothing worth discussing," he said finally. "If John wants to tell you tomorrow, you can ask him. I don't know if it's my place to say."

It was additionally to Scott's credit that he was his father's son. This particular fact was especially irritating because it meant that Scott had immediately and automatically gone for the moral high ground. It was disarming and put Jeff in a position where he'd be pressing the point for his own sake, rather than out of concern for John. He settled for a disapproving frown. "You're sure?"

"Yeah, Dad, I'm sure." Scott shrugged, leaning back, an arm across the back of the couch. He went on, debriefing. "It wasn't anything major. Just a late night. John was tired and you know how he gets. Something spooked him and he snapped. I shouldn't have let us get sidetracked. So, my bad."

Scott had also learned, in the course of his twenty-seven years on Earth, that the way around his father's wrath was by owning up to transgression, real or perceived, and defining them on his own terms. He had neatly taken the blame for whatever had happened tonight, in such a way that Jeff didn't actually blame him. It had been very deftly done, and Jeff suspected Scott knew that just as well as he did.

But there was something more there. Scott's natural advantage as the eldest was equally his disadvantage—Jeff knew Scott's tells, and there was something going unsaid. Scott had very elegantly passed the buck, in the way only the eldest of five possibly could, and made it John's problem, and John was currently picking up an imprint of the cream-colored Italian leather arm of the sofa on the side of his face. It was a question for tomorrow, if Jeff could even bring himself to ask it.

Little  _bastard_.

But still, a little bastard who was currently shaking John's shoulder, waking him up so he could be gently shepherded to bed. John came awake, sitting up unsteadily, and Scott already had his arm around his shoulders and a hand to his chest, leaning in close to murmur something Jeff wasn't privy to, even from two feet away—but which got John to nod and sigh and get to his feet. Scott, again, with the assist, helped him up, made sure he had his balance before giving him a light, brotherly shove. "Take the main floor bedroom tonight, Jaybird. Stairs seem like they'd be a tall order right about now."

Jeff reached out and caught John's elbow, taking over. "I've got it, Scotty. You should turn in. You've got an early morning tomorrow."

Scott made a rather theatrical show of tugging up his loosened shirt cuff and glancing at his watch. "Makes two of us," he said and had the nerve to add, "and I'm not in my fifties."

"Watch it, Scooter, or you'll be lucky to see your thirties." Jeff shooed his eldest away. "Go to bed. Let me parent my son for a while."

"Yessir." Scott grinned at that and did as he was told, making a beeline for the elegant spiral staircase up to the second level. He paused at the bottom, a hand on the railing, and offered, "G'night, Dad. John."

Jeff softened slightly from mock irritation with his son's flippancy. "Good night, Scott. Thank you for looking after your brother."

"No more than he'd do for me."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter written entirely by Prelude. Edits by me.


	4. Pinboard

 

 

Robin could see Fanny through the glass of his office, industriously sorting through some papers on her desk. Why couldn't she have taken the day off like normal people and let him keep the shades down and the lights off? His head hurt, like some small creature of the night had moved in and was digging its way through the spongy cortex, and Robin wanted nothing more than to be somewhere else with his head in the toilet, instead of at work, going over the fiscal year for the lab in Jakarta.

Fanny probably thought he was muscling through a work migraine on sheer willpower, as if he'd ever been that motivated in his life. As if he hadn't drunk half a bottle of Scotch and picked a fight with the Tracys.  _The_   _Tracys_. LA's headlining act, the all-singing, all-dancing von Tracy family. Scott was a varsity jacket short of being a total meathead, and John was the postgrad uberdouche you didn't want to meet in a dark alley. And Robin had played them in poker. Oh God, there was no end to the idiocy. Thinking about it made it worse. Everything made everything worse. He opened his desk drawer. Where was his bottle of aspirin? There were too many things in his drawer.

Stapler. Post-Its.

"Sir?"

The clock he'd broken.

"Robin?"

He looked up. Fanny was standing at his desk—when did she get here?—a bottle of water in one hand and a small, white bottle of aspirin in the other. "For your headache," she said.

"Headache," he echoed, accepting the bottle of aspirin. "Yes. That's what this is." He winced. Smooth. "I mean...thanks."

Fanny set the bottle of water down on his desk. "How was the party?"

"The party?" Robin repeated, stalling for time so the better answer could work its way through the fog in his brain. "Oh, it was fine. Decent turnout. Good food." That was underselling it but he couldn't think far enough ahead to come up with anything better. He twisted the cap off the aspirin bottle and shook out two pills into his hand. "You know how it is."

"Any familiar faces?"

Right. Because that had been the plan. Show up, casually make the rounds, run into someone from the Good Ol' Days in a way that wouldn't seem intentional. A bit of a long shot, admittedly, and probably a bad idea, and  _definitely_  not part of Duncan's carefully curated schedule. Especially seeing as he'd left explicit instructions not to accept invitations to Anything while he was out of the country. "Not really. But I don't know what I was expecting anyway. You haven't seen the readout for the downtown properties, have you? I can't seem to find it."

"No, I haven't." Fanny was giving him a look, as if he was missing something obvious. "I just came to remind you about the meeting."

Robin opened the water bottle to wash down the pills. "What meeting?"

"With Branson Davis. At 10?"

The water went down the wrong pipe, and Robin choked, spilling water down his front. "W-what?"

"Friday at 10."

Robin coughed again, stabbing desperately at the wet stain on his tie. "But today's Saturday."

Fanny glanced at the clock on his desk as if it would back her up. "No, sir. It's Friday."

"No, no, no. Because yesterday was Friday, because there was a party. And people have parties on Fridays." That sounded incredibly inane, even to his own ears. "Today is Saturday," he repeated, a little helplessly, and even as he said it he knew he was wrong, because  _of course_  Fanny knew what day it was, and he didn't because  _did he ever_? "Who the hell throws a party on a Thursday night?" He didn't actually expect her to have an answer. "And why did I go?"

He had to swallow what felt like the beginning of a faint panic. No. Couldn't lose his head. Not now. He had work to do. Branson Davis. 10 o'clock. Branson Davis. Robin glanced at his watch. Forty minutes. He had forty minutes to get to the meeting. "Why didn't you tell me earlier?" That was unfair because Fanny was everything at the office he wasn't—and she had probably said something on Monday, and then again yesterday, and maybe even this morning when he'd rolled up to work wearing his darkest pair of shades. Robin frantically rummaged through the papers to find his tablet. He found it under a pile of lab notes and grabbed it, and his phone and suit jacket from the back of the chair.

:

The quiet of the driverless car did nothing to settle his stomach. Robin nervously wrapped his fingers around the edge of the tablet. He couldn't seem to remember anything these days if it wasn't written down on a Post-It. And even then he forgot the check the Post-Its. But how could he forget a meeting with Branson Davis? Robin had spent the week being briefed about time projections and cost estimates, half of which he'd never understood, and half of which he'd forgotten on the elevator back from accounting. And he didn't really want to ask the guy in the glasses to explain it to him again. For the fifth time. Because Robin was dumber than a bag of rocks, which would definitely explain why he'd invited the Tracys to the table.

There was a bottle of whisky in the car somewhere, the kind intended for business meetings on-the-go, and maybe a drink would help kill the butterflies in his stomach. Though it was more like a lot of bees, the angry swarm roiling unhappily in his gut. That's how he'd collected bugs for his pinboard when he was little, except instead of whisky it had been a killing jar and a cotton ball soaked in ethyl acetate.

Robin fiddled around with the buttons by his elbow, and the liquor compartment popped open to his right, the bottle and snifter rising with a mechanical hiss. Macallan. Single Malt. He stared at the name. Duncan wouldn't approve. He'd have something to say about moderation, about keeping a clear head and seizing the day or some other trite adage that might work on people who weren't Robin. Duncan was the kind of person who made a mug of mulled wine last the entire Christmas season. Maybe an eggnog if he was feeling wild. Robin put a hand to the bottle. Duncan, who only tried to help, who'd sat him down a long time ago and outlined the acceptable topics to cover in polite conversation (health, family, upcoming trips to Europe), even though Robin had been perfectly aware it hadn't been appropriate to tell Mrs. Goldstein he'd finally tried acid. What Duncan hadn't told him then was how much harder it was to 'talk shop', this nebulous business slang Robin doubted he'd ever get his head around.

"The local traffic conditions have deteriorated due to an accident on Bella Garaza." The automated drone of the driverless car interrupted the silence. "We are currently on the fastest route to the Kepler Building, Ro-bin."

Robin pushed the compartment down, the bottle and glass slotting back into hiding. Duncan was right. Once was enough. Twice was just asking for it.

:

Robin used to be good at excuses. That he really did have a good reason for not doing his homework or skipping last period. Big, blue eyes and a megawatt smile had usually been enough to get him out of trouble. There was that one time he'd made Ms. Baker cry for the dead dog he'd never had. But now—when he stood in front of Branson Davis's office—his head felt slow, rusty, like something had dropped off its axel a long time ago, and he was nervous and vaguely ill, and the red carpet with its pattern of yellow fans was frankly nauseating. He swallowed the unease. Get it together, Robin. This should be easy. A few handshakes, a presentation, a little reassuring on his part.

He knocked, and the door opened, Branson Davis in the frame, and Robin stammered out, "I'm sorry I'm late." Twenty minutes. "There was an accident on the…" he trailed off because there wasn't much else to the excuse.

"That's fine. Come in." Branson Davis held the door open for him. "I'm glad we finally get to meet. We've worked with your father before."

"Ah. Yes." Robin stepped inside, trying not to squint in the bright light of the office, as if his retinas weren't bleeding and he was perfectly okay. "Thank you for seeing me."

"We'll have to get started as soon as possible." Branson Davis held out a hand in a vague gesture. "My partners, Roger Thornton. Laura Miller."

Robin shook hands with them.

"And my guests today—well, you know the Tracys."

What?

"Jeff, you remember Richard's son."

No.

Robin turned, and whatever Branson Davis was saying lost all clarity, fading out around the edges, because Jeff Tracy was standing there in the room, with Scott and John on either side of him, bookends to their father, the man, the myth, the legend; cosmonaut, visionary, industrialist—the magnate whose jawline launched a thousand lunar explorations. Jeff Tracy, wearing the same clipped annoyance Robin remembered from the blueblood socials at Harwick—a dark blue suit, pinstriped, a silver dagger of a pin across his tie—and Robin was fourteen again and Fitz had just poured yoghurt down his uniform, the awful, icy clot sliding down his spine, and this was a dream. It  _had_  to be a dream, because Robin couldn't possibly be standing in the same room as Branson Davis and Jeff Tracy when just last night Robin had—

"Robin?"

Robin started. "Huh?"

"The presentation?" said Branson Davis, pointing at something. "The projector?"

"What?"

"You mentioned you had some notes to show." Branson Davis looked a little concerned. "I didn't mean to spring this on you, but I thought you wouldn't mind, seeing as we're all in the same business. Jeff, you were telling me about your talk with the GDF, and Locke Industries have shown some promising prototypes in—actually, Robin, why don't you just show us?"

Robin tried to clear his throat. "Yes. Right." He couldn't remember what to do. The tablet. The presentation. He looked down, pressed a button, scrolled through, fingers slipping on the shiny surface. The moment seemed to stretch into eternity. His head was pounding, the queasy feeling coming back stronger. How long had he been standing there? A minute? An hour?

"Are you—"

"I'm fine. I-I have it here." But something was wrong. He stared numbly at the tablet. There was a crack across the right-hand corner, a crack from when he'd dropped it on the stairs, but that couldn't possibly be right because that meant he didn't have the right tablet. His stomach turned. There was nothing on this, just notes. He was suddenly hot, the starched collar pushing into his throat. "I was just—I have—" He stopped, the awful queasiness rolling over him again, and he only managed a step towards the door before his gut clenched, and he doubled over and vomited.

A deafening silence.

Robin coughed, straightening slowly, and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. He didn't feel better, and there was more coming, and he couldn't look up because he knew what they were thinking, and they were right. He fled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written by Easionia During


	5. John

 

 

The problem with having been at rock bottom was that now John knew what it looked like. He hadn't thought it was recognizable from the outside—his own internal hell had been basically indiscernible by passersby, and even by his family, right up until it hadn't been. But apparently hell called unto its own. Kinship of any kind with  _Robin Locke_ —of all the infernal people—was the last thing he wanted in the entire world.

But it was still the reason he was picking listlessly at a shrimp caesar salad and ignoring his respective third of the literal three-martini lunch split three ways between him, Scott and their father. It was only eleven in the morning, and technically, this probably qualified as brunch, but none of them drank mimosas, so martinis it is.

And at another point in his life he could have gotten away with it, with remaining quietly introspective, present but disconnected while his father and brother chatted. And once upon a time, he could've escaped scrutiny for his lack of appetite, especially for a shrimp salad that turned out to be less appetizing than the menu had made it seem. And if he weren't a recovering addict, he wouldn't be watching Dad and Scott exchange significant glances across the table, a wordless negotiation in the space above their actual conversation, trying to determine which one of them was going to break into John's silence.

Perhaps predictably, Scott reached over and speared a shrimp on the end of his fork, plucking it neatly out of the middle of John's plate and popped it into his mouth. "You should eat that, or I will," he said, like it was a threat even after he'd already polished off a tenderloin fillet, several artfully arranged spears of asparagus, and a dozen marble-sized new potatoes, all drenched in béarnaise sauce, because Scott was the sort of person who ate steak for brunch. "C'mon, Johnny."

John was six feet, two and a half inches tall, and weighed a hundred and seventy-three pounds. It had taken six months to regain the latest thirty-five of those, which only reinforced how dangerously underweight he'd been to begin with. Ounce by ounce, he was finally far enough within the boundaries of a normal BMI that Gordon had stopped calling him every Friday, demanding that he weigh himself and report in. He'd also been permitted to return to a diet of his own preference, rather than Gordon's strict direction. His younger brother was the family's resident authority on caloric intake and still adhered to a swimmer's diet. Broadly speaking, Gordon advocated for whole grains and whole milk, fruits and leafy greens, avocados and eggs, and enough pasta to choke an Italian.

Left to his own devices John would probably have lived on protein bars and black coffee and the occasional sesame seed bagel. And subsequently died of scurvy. So he tolerated Gordon's oversight—appreciated it, even. But only from Gordon, who knew how to couch his instruction in such a way that it didn't feel like coddling. Unfortunately, his supervision of John's diet had installed an irritating vigilance in the rest of the family, and now they all had a tendency to watch him eat.

Or not eat.

Dad tagged in, eyebrows knitting. "Are you feeling all right?" he inquired, all kid gloves and fatherly concern. "I understand that this morning was probably…off-putting."

John shoved his plate in Scott's direction, a move relatively equivalent to picking up a rook and sending it clear across the chessboard. He then reached for the martini he'd left sweating on its coaster and downed half of it, which was equivalent to taking the bishop and cramming it into the opposing player's eye.

But then, if they both  _insisted_  on watching him all the goddamn time, Scott and Dad would have to accept the reality that occasionally they wouldn't like what they saw. Occasionally they'd catch him feeling like shit. John didn't answer his father. He didn't look at Scott. "Parmesan cheese contains a short-chain chemical compound called butyric acid. Has it in common with vomit." This was something he'd learned from Gordon, because this was the sort of thing Gordon would know and liked to repeat. Gordon was full of all manner of trivia, and dropped it into all manner of awkward silences, using obscure facts and figures to promote conversation. John was hoping to  _provoke_ a conversation. There was a subtle difference.

And it seemed like it was working, because Dad sighed and picked his napkin off his lap, wiping his fingertips. Scott's scrutiny ebbed for just a second, his gaze flickering over to their father. Like a Doberman trying to determine if he's about to be let off his leash. Nothing passed between them, or at least nothing John could discern, but Scott still obediently picked up the third-degree, like a stick that'd been thrown the length of the dog park. He pushed John's discarded Caesar salad to the center of the table. "And is that just a fun fact meant to shake up the table, or are you feeling unwell?"

John finished his martini, glaring at his brother for trying to talk like Dad.

Dad and Scott exchanged a Look. Those members of John's social circle who were In The Know have been exchanging Looks for the better part of the past six months, the six months that so far constituted the bounds of his all-hallowed Sobriety. And for a while it was nice to be thought of. Once he got used to the attention, after having spent so much time flying so far below the radar he'd been practically subterranean—it was nice. There was a butter zone, a period of time where it was heartwarming to be reminded of how much his family actually cared. Gordon and Virgil still called him every day, but Gordon and Virgil both Got It, something he'd never expected of either of them. And Dad talked to him, asked the right questions, actually listened to the answers. Someone had given Uncle Lee the means to mark time and he kept sending sobriety chips, ticking off the weeks and then the months of John's abstinence in shades of enameled bronze. Scott was pretty much the same as always, except for the great big swath of darkness secretly carved through him, but at least he and John finally had that in common.

"Are you upset about last night?" Dad probed carefully. "Or about this morning?"

"I'm not upset." John wanted that to be true, and that was why it sounded exactly like a lie. Being  _upset_  would mean he had something to be upset  _about_ , and he didn't want that. Currently he didn't want anything other than to go home and back to bed.

Another Look flitted across the table.

He had been offered the option, not even three hours ago, of staying home, skipping out on the meeting with Branson Davis. Because John had, after all, had a bit of a rough night. The first panic attack in months. He'd been doing so well and Dad hadn't wanted to ask too much of him. John could have stayed in bed, but it had been six months and he was sick of the coddling. So he'd gone. And now he wished he hadn't.

John couldn't fathom how someone could possibly do something as utterly horrific as vomiting on the carpet at the feet of two of the most major players in the aerotech industry and not proceed to the next logical step of immediately walking into the nearest available traffic. He'd had the impulse even just by proxy, as Robin had fled and Branson Davis, absolutely mortified, had made his apologies. Dad had graciously, mercifully, suggested they reschedule.

Virgil liked to say that empathy had smoothed things over between John and Gordon because Gordon was just  _made_  of empathy. Playing to Gordon's compassion was the shortest and surest route to getting him to do anything, and John had been the beneficiary of his little brother's capacity to care. Apparently it was catching. He didn't like it.

"Well, Johnny…" Scott started, his tone exaggerated patience, a mollifying, big-brotherly forbearance for his little brother and all his damage. This was the thing John hated most about having Scott back in his life, and John already felt the slight tic of his lower eyelid, the tightening in his jaw; but before Scott had the chance to engage some meaningless platitude, their father interjected.

" _Why_  are you upset?"

It had the tone of a question that wouldn't sustain a bullshit answer. The kid gloves were gone. Their father's voice was silk over steel, and John perked up at the notion that he might be taken seriously. He looked from Dad to Scott, pausing to take in the question. "Scott knows why."

Scott froze in his seat, no longer a Doberman but a deer in their father's headlights. He very clearly did not know why, even though Dad's attention swiveled toward him. There was a twist of slightly vindictive pleasure, curling like smoke through the baser reaches of John's cerebral cortex, because it was so very rare to watch Scott squirm, especially beneath their father's flinty blue gaze.

"This is about last night," Dad concluded without any external input because—well, because Dad wasn't an idiot.

Scott looked helplessly to his younger brother, but John just folded his arms across his chest and betrayed nothing. "I guess," said Scott, shrugging.

Dad didn't look away from Scott but addressed John. "Your brother didn't feel it was his place to tell me what happened last night."

"No," said John, "I imagine he wouldn't have."

"Do you have any intention of telling me what happened?"

"No, sir. I'd rather not."

If it hadn't been for the quiet, refined clamor of the restaurant around them, John would have sworn he heard his father's back teeth click together, irritated, impatient. Scott reached for his drink and drained it, two extra olives speared on the cocktail pick inside the glass.

Jeff looked back and forth between them. "Is there something you two need to discuss?"

Scott nodded, cleared his throat of liquor and olive juice. "Seems like it."

Dad shook his head, pushing his own drink away, and gestured sharply over his shoulder for a waiter and the check. He stood up and Scott took the hint to withdraw his own wallet, even as their waiter swanned over. "The two of you are adults," said Dad. "Sort it out yourselves. I'm going back to the office, and you two can make your way home. John, I'll expect you back in the lab tomorrow morning. Scott, some of the boys in aeronautics want some further debrief after your most recent test flights. At your earliest convenience."

John nodded. "Thanks for lunch, Dad."

Dad dropped a pair of hundred dollar bills on the table, the waiter taking Scott's inky black credit card. "Thank your brother."

John didn't. Instead he caught the waiter's attention, gestured to his empty glass and his brother's. "Same again, new tab."

Scott had been gathering his jacket from the back of his chair. He stopped, settled back into his seat. The waiter bustled away. Their father watched the entire exchange and there was just the barest hint of trepidation, something that might cause him to hesitate, if Jeff Tracy had ever been a man who hesitated.

"John," he said, his tone softening slightly. "John, if it  _was_  this morning—if I shouldn't have made you come..."

John didn't answer, and Dad trailed off, shaking his head, sighing to himself. "But of course, I didn't. You made your own choice, and you're allowed to make your own choices. I'm sorry if you regret making this one, and I'm sorry that it became…" he searched for the right word, "unpleasant. I imagine you're fairly sensitive to seeing people fail."

If Scott had been hoping for any clues as to what was going on, by the way he'd been listening so intently from across the table, he wasn't going to get them. Before Dad left, he put a hand to John's shoulder, the slightest pressure. Affection or concern, either way, his voice was uncharacteristically gentle as he went on, "If it makes any difference, as far as an explanation, I happen to know that Robin's father passed away, coming up on a year now. Those sorts of anniversaries are always hard. You boys both know that, and I would hope you could both be reasonably charitable in your interpretation of events."

John felt his heart slide into his stomach, and he couldn't answer, so Scott said, "Sure, Dad. We'll see you at home."

"I might be late. Be good, boys."

Their father departed and left behind silence. The waiter returned with the check and two drinks, but not before John polished off the third of three glasses left on the table. Of course, Dad didn't drink a martini so much as he drank a Gibson, and to John's immediate displeasure, he found that his father drank a Gibson, according to apocryphal tradition; which was to say he drank a glass of ice cold water with a cocktail onion in it, to remain resolutely sober. But Scott didn't know this and he stared, and John's stomach turned at the thought of having downed a whole glass of onion water, even if it had been to save face.

And there was a tipping point, when the second round arrived, where things could go either way with Scott. There was a moment before he decided what to say next, a Schrodinger state of fucking up or fucking off, where it was possible for him to realize he should leave this one alone. But he didn't. He didn't even have the decency to take the high road. "Hey, shithead," he bristled. "Possibly you've forgotten, but you know how our dad's dad drank himself to death? D'you figure our father might be kinda sensitive to watching his drug addict son get plastered over lunch? Just a thought."

There was that play for empathy again, but John had successfully started to take the edge off this and it didn't hit as hard as it might have. He could manage not to care about their father, in favor of caring about himself. "Oh  _great_ , Scotty,  _thanks_. Tell the whole goddamn restaurant."

Scott scoffed, but he didn't turn away the drink the waiter left at his elbow, or intervene when John took a sip of his own, of the right drink this time, mostly to get the taste of watery onion out of the back corners of his mouth. Scott's disapproval was frank and unsubtle. Out of their father's company, Scott's opinions were losing their sugary coating, and he ceased to be his brother's keeper. Cain was particularly notorious for murdering Abel, but at least John feels forewarned on that score.

John put his drink back down, still mostly full. "I'm not getting  _plastered_."

Scott just gave him another Look. "Yeah, you and your featherweight tolerance are totally gonna be just  _fine_ after three drinks in under an hour. Jesus, John. What the hell's wrong with you?"

Scott was right. John probably shouldn't be drinking and he knew that, not even deep down but right on the surface. He had upset Dad, and God knows he'd done more than enough to upset their father over the last few years, but here he was, doing it again anyway. It was worse now, because the only thing his father wanted to do was help. All he wanted was to know what was wrong and if he could fix it.

John reached for his martini and took another sip. It wasn't his drink of choice and he wasn't really enjoying it, but it just seemed to help unmuddy his thoughts, simplifying things down to their basics.

"Did I do something wrong?" There was a defensive note in Scott's tone, like he didn't actually  _believe_  he could've done anything wrong but had to concede it was a possibility.

It took John a while and another swallow of martini to work out the answer, because he could already tell Scott wasn't going to like it. "Yes. But you couldn't have done it without me _,_ so it's not exactly like I can blame you."

"What the hell does that mean?"

"You know how Grandma always used to say that there was nothing worse than the wrong pair of us?"

This must have seemed like a rabbit track, because it gave Scott pause, and he looked confused. "Did Grandma say that? What does  _that_  mean?"

John shrugged. The foot of his glass rested on a coaster, and his fingertips rested on this. He turned the little circle of paper slowly against the surface of the tablecloth, staring fixedly at his glass. "We're not always the best influences on each other."

"So this  _is_  about last night."

John pushed his drink away, only a few sips gone. He'd utterly lost his taste for it anyway, and on an empty stomach it had already pushed him to that slightly woozy edge, the very first indication that he was getting a little tipsy. He didn't actually want that. Not really. "And this morning," he added, another breadcrumb for Scott to follow through the woods.

That was roundabout, and Scott always had a more straightforward way of plowing into the thick of things with a machete. "You feel sorry for Robin."

Hopefully there was a remedy for that, and one that didn't taste like juniper berries. "I guess."

Scott scoffed lightly and shook his head. "Oh well, easy fix there, bro. He's not worth your pity. Not even a little."

"Not even if it was our fault?"

Now Scott tilted his head slightly, narrowed his eyes as if he was trying to work something out. After a few calculating moments, he came up with a statement that was nowhere near as careful as it should have been, for the time it took to make. "This 'caring about other people's feelings' schtick is kind of a new for you."

That was probably not inaccurate for Scott to say, but it still hurt, just a little, and John flushed, embarrassed and maybe even a little bit ashamed of himself. "I don't know. I…I don't—I'm bad at this. I always have been."

"Maybe not always."

John shrugged again. "Lately, then."

"Well, whatever. New development or not, Dad says it's important to know what your resources are, and to maximize them appropriately. I promise you, the bright new growth of your potential for actual human empathy is  _wasted_  on Robin. Pun intended. Last night he sent you into a goddamn panic attack _,_ and you haven't had one of those in  _months_."

John winced at the memory, though he never  _really_  remembered what a panic attack was like. The world somehow seemed to tear apart, run screaming to an end, and everything after was unfocused, indistinct, like a bad dream. Sometimes he couldn't even remember what set him off. He wasn't sure what compelled him to make excuses, but he heard himself go on. "It was late. I was tired. We'd been playing cards for an hour. I don't even know what he said anymore, but it can't have been that bad."

By the way Scott was looking at him, this was something of a miscalculation. "Are you serious? Last night you were ready to move back to Kansas."

John flushed. "I don't remember that."

"A tad bit dramatic, yeah, but I get it." Scott took a sip of his drink. "What I can't figure out is how that son of a bitch knew about Harvard."

John flinched, small pieces of last night's game coming back to him. "But this morning, he didn't know we were going to be there."

"So?" Scott dismissed that argument. "He shouldn't have been hungover. He shouldn't have invited us to poker if he didn't want to get his ass kicked. In fact, he probably shouldn't have been  _at_  the party,  _especially_  if he knew he had a presentation in the morning. With or without Dad present."

"I guess," said John, fingering the edges of his glass. The wind had gone out of his earlier conviction, the semblance of his argument blurring out, like one of Virgil's charcoal sketches, the lines fudging, and that's what he'd wanted, wasn't it? To be convinced he was wrong? That he'd gotten his wires crossed, and that this gnawing at the back of his head wasn't guilt, but just the average, residual discomfort of having front-row seats to someone else's humiliation. And Scott was probably right. This was his territory, wasn't it? Caring about things. Caring too much about things. The countless times he'd steamrollered to the rescue—pulling cats from trees, patching up scraped knees, digging Mrs. Brennan's car out of the snow without anyone asking him too. And six months ago, John wouldn't have cared about Robin because he wouldn't have cared to notice. Idiots were a dime a dozen, even in Harvard, that special blend of trust fund baby and big ego, and there was always that dumbass who drank too much and woke up in someone else's empty pool.

"You guess?" Scott shook his head at him. "Maybe—and I say this  _very_  generously—I'd give him a pass, even shed a little tear for his troubles if I knew it was a one-time thing. If he didn't insist on being such a little bitch. You remember that party in the Hamptons?"

"Vaguely." Most parties didn't leave any lasting impressions.

"We left early," said Scott, "because Robin's goons were messing with me. They pushed me around a bit. Tried to throw me in the pool. 'Tried' being the operative word."

"I didn't know that."

"Because I didn't tell you. You didn't need to know," said Scott. "But maybe you do now. To clarify things. The point is, John—Robin has always been ass. And he's not worth your time."

That all made sense. John didn't look up. It was logical, evidence-based, something that should ease the knot at the back of his stomach. But then why didn't it make him feel any better? "He didn't give me a panic attack," John said at last. This was something he'd talked to Gordon about, when John wanted to understand the finer nuances of why he completely lost his shit from time to time. "No one can  _give_  you a panic attack."

"Whatever." Scott didn't seem to appreciate the distinction. "He grabbed you. He's lucky I let him keep his front teeth."

"I said something awful."

"So did he. Call it even."

"But I didn't know his dad was…" John couldn't finish the sentence. "That he had—"

"Don't do that, John." Scott finished his martini and took out his wallet, thumbing out enough money to pay for the drinks twice over. "That's not on you. You didn't know. You couldn't possibly have known."

John didn't answer. If it wasn't on him, then he shouldn't feel bad.

"You ready to go?" The question was more challenge than query: Scott was clearly done with anything related to Robin Locke, and there wasn't much room for disagreement anyway because Scott was already pushing his chair back and picking up his jacket, and John didn't want to sit in a restaurant by himself with this crush in his chest. It would fade, wouldn't it? Didn't all feelings fade? They had before. At Harvard. When he'd had Adderall to get him started, to pare things down to essentials, carefully parceling out his energy to meet the social necessities of seeing professors and classmates and the eventual, inescapable project partners. Things had been simpler then, neater, an equation that could be solved without redundancies, twenty-four hours that could be measured into precise stretches of time around the pills that kept him sharp.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter almost entirely written by Prelude. I wrote the end and did the editing. Teamwork.


	6. Scenic Route

 

 

It was a known fact in the Tracy household that John could be impressively heartless, his wrath quiet and thorough and set aside for those who didn't deserve a second chance. Like the time Scott had broken his ant farm. Scott had been sorry, but more because Mom had seen the whole thing and made him apologize, which he had in a half-assed sorry-your-ant-farm-got-in-the-way-of-my-elbow kind of way. And John had stood there, tight-lipped and grim, gripping the wooden frame of what was left of his ant farm, the destruction of scattered sand and eggs and terrified ants desperately trying to reform into some impression of a colony. And Scott should have known then from the way John resolutely  _didn't_  cry that it would've been better for everyone if Scott had packed his things and got the hell out of Dodge before that little volcano blew its top. Of course, back then, Scott had taken John's wordless nod for reconciliation, as if he'd surrendered, gone quietly into the night, accepted his fate as the perpetual loser in the fraternal hierarchy. Scott had leaned too much into the safety of 'being the older brother', therefore untouchable, and come next morning he'd woken to John unceremoniously dumping ants into his bed. Scott had used some of the shiny new swear words he'd picked up around the schoolyard and charged after him, down the stairs, skidding around the corner and accidentally snagged the edge of the wobbly dresser. It had gone down, keeled over with a deafening crash, and the whole house was suddenly awake and up in arms and taking sides.

John had been unrepentant then. And this last year he hadn't exactly been the paradigm for human kindness. At Christmas—the few hours John had been home—he'd been distracted and distant, and he and Gordon had spent the time snarling at each other from respective corners of the house. Scott liked to think that maybe he'd picked up on it, the weird vibe, the carefully polished veneer of Things As They Should Be, but John had said everything was fine and acted the part of the true Harvard Son, and Scott didn't put the arrogance down to anything other than the Ivy League filing down the last of his affected humility. John could be an acquired taste, and the two years at Harvard hadn't helped. Which was why it was weird to see him so bent out of shape over the clusterfuck that was Robin Locke.

This morning's flameout had been nothing short of spectacular. Branson Davis's office was the last place Scott had expected to see Robin—a kind of jarring tilt to reality, as if he'd had stepped into some bizarro universe where Robin had retired the bottles of Dom and his yacht in the Maldives for a nine to five in the city.

But it hadn't been all bad. At least now Scott had immutable proof that Robin was as much of a moron as he'd always suspected, and it certainly didn't hurt that Branson Davis & Co had been there to witness the fiasco, in case Robin ever had the need for character references.

Scott lead the way back through the restaurant, mostly because John was quiet and unfocused and needed the nudge into the elevator. Scott pressed the button for the lobby and leaned back against the wall, watching John absently roll the sleeve of his grey cashmere sweater.

"You're not going to get hung up on this whole Robin thing, are you?" said Scott, and the question was friendly fire, a depth charge testing the waters. "Because you're too smart to let that guy get in your head." And John usually was. He just had the occasional blind spot when it came to reading people. And Dad. "All I'm saying is," Scott tried again, a little softer this time, "hindsight will kill you. If you let it."

John didn't say anything, watching the floors flick by through the glassy hull of the elevator.

"You're hearing me, right, little brother?"

John finally spared him a look. "I'm hearing you."

The elevator dinged and the doors slid open to the palatial foyer of the Lyria Hotel, a few guests at the front desk, a bellhop loading a set of Burberry bags onto the golden luggage cart. It should have been a definitive end to the conversation. Should have been. Except John had stopped on the round carpet by the giant vase of cut flowers halfway through the lobby, and Scott turned to see why exactly he'd come to a standstill, following his gaze to the bar at the far end—a halo of soft lights, a few scattered clients, a pair of old ladies in pearls drinking prosecco and enjoying a plate of finger sandwiches, a chamber orchestra coaxing a silky bossa nova from a cello—and at the end of the curved marble counter, a patron in a blue suit.

Robin.

Unbelievable. Well, maybe not  _entirely_  unbelievable—after all, the hotel was across the street from the Kepler Building, which was the reason Dad had picked it in the first place—so logistically speaking, it wasn't impossible for Robin to have made his way here. But the sheer stupidity of going from hangover to bar was breathtaking, especially for the guy whose insides had just become his outsides. Scott checked his watch. 11:40. Calculate in the time Robin had probably spent in the bathroom after the meeting—there was something poetic about the image of him hunched over the toilet in his blue Italian suit—and the approximate half-hour it would've taken him to get here and order his drinks—he'd made impressively short work of living up to his reputation.

John still hadn't moved, and it was like Scott could see the gears grinding to a halt in his little brother's head, a short circuit somewhere in the system that would explain why he was even considering taking the road less traveled. "That's a bad idea," Scott declared, and John was distracted enough to look at him.

"What is?"

"Talking to Robin." Scott could feel the frustration bubble up. These sudden-onset scruples were proving to be a pain in the ass. "He's a train wreck up close  _and_  from a distance. Just step aside and let it happen."

John frowned. "I…can't."

Scott took a breath, a deep, calming breath and refrained from saying the first thing that came to mind. He wasn't mad at John— _Robin_  was the little shit who'd messed with his brother's head. "You need a demonstration? Your empirical evidence is over there, downing shooters for second breakfast."

"I know," John didn't seem to appreciate the tone. "I have eyes."

Scott gave him a hard look. This wasn't John's infamous stubborn streak coming to play. This was something else, something wordless, a set of imperfect correlations looping back to Robin, so before John Glenn Tracy had the brilliant idea of walking back into that particular line of fire  _on his own_ , Scott headed for the bar first, deviating from the path of least resistance to stroll up to Robin in a way that seemed off-hand and casual when it wasn't. John arrived a second later, but Scott already had the opening address.

"Sup, Robin."

Robin tensed at the sound of his name and looked up. He was distinctly more rumpled than when he'd come through the doors of the office earlier; he'd loosened his tie, undone the top button of his blue shirt and pushed back his sleeves—the picture of the harried working stiff at week's end. Scott might have been more inclined to believe the impression if he didn't know Robin had spent last night at the poker table and this morning regretting it.

Robin was confused, the primitive recall muscling its way through a boozy core. There were empty glasses on the counter and a bottle of whisky within the bartender's reach. "Tracy?"

"What are you doing here, Robin?" Scott gave him a moment to let the rhetorical nature of the question sink in. "I take it you didn't learn anything from last night."

Robin reacted about as well as Scott expected him to. "That the Tracys are assholes?"

"I meant the part about you showing up drunk."

Robin made a face. " _Hungover_ ," he corrected, as if that made it better, "and I would have been  _just fine_  if you hadn't been there."

"Is that so?" The tone was patronizing, not conducive to fostering insightful conversation, but Scott was getting a little tired of playing middleman, and this was a reconnaissance mission anyway, meant to give John enough observable specifics to let him know Robin wasn't in the mood to chat.

"It's not like I haven't done it before," said Robin, souring. "If you hadn't played me in poker last night, then—"

" _You_  invited us," said Scott, "or did you forget that detail?"

Logically outmaneuvered, Robin fell back to ignoring the narrative. "Whatever. It's still your fault." He knocked back his dram of finely aged whisky like a bro at a frat party and grimaced, gesturing for a refill. "So you're here to…what? Set me back on the straight and narrow?"

After so many years, Scott had forgotten about people like Robin Locke. They'd been everywhere in Yale, a petri dish for the supercilious, I-paid-for-an-A douchebaggery that went on behind the scenes. Scott had spent enough time rubbing shoulders with the over-privileged few to know they wore the same brands and went to the same parties and took the same pictures of their private jets and luxury cars and Greek-island vacations. And inevitably, by nature or design, they always ended up in LA, west coast mecca for the young and the tasteless, killing time in their semi-permanent headquarters until the next international tour of novelty nightclubs.

Scott was suddenly immensely grateful for Dad being such a hardass on Gordon when he went off the deep end, because seeing Robin getting wasted before noon was like looking at Gordon's Ghost of Christmas Future. Two years ago it had been kinda funny to watch the Olympic win go straight to his little brother's head, like something critical had shut down, and the next four months of partying were just the physical manifestation of the rolling blackouts guttering through his brain. Dad had been pretty hard on him, in only the way Jeff Tracy could be hard on his fourth son and heir, because Dad hadn't taken to the Tracy name being bandied about in the media like a punchy synonym for unbridled youth. And it had worked: Gordon was up in Santa Barbara, keeping his nose clean and whining about early morning stats classes.

Scott glanced at John. Surely he could see this whole exchange was circuitous, and not just because Robin was drunk and obnoxious, but because it felt too much like déjà vu, like a temporal rift had opened in the hotel bar, and they were looking back at an outdated version of Robin from the Hamptons. Scott sighed. "You haven't changed at all, have you, Robin?"

Robin seemed to take it as a compliment. "Right? I'm exactly the same. And you're the good little boys who can do no wrong," he winked at John, "or at least you were."

Scott hardened instinctively. "Fuck off, Robin."

"Oh, lighten up, Scott," said Robin, picking up his new drink. "It's not like he's the first Tracy to step out of line." He grinned, tipping his glass at Scott in a salute before downing it, and maybe this was an attempt at a clever brush-off, the kind of snappy comeback that could have been more effective if Robin hadn't suddenly gone a bit green.

Scott tilted his head at him, wanting to laugh. "You feeling okay there, buddy?"

Robin swallowed and slowly put the glass back down on the counter. "I'm fine. I just…" he swallowed again, jaw stiffening against whatever was trying to work its way back through the system, "…remembered something."

"You sure?"

Robin didn't even seem to hear him. "I…I have to—" he tried to get off the bar stool and stumbled, knocked the bottle of whisky off the counter and it fell, shattering on the marble floor.

The music stopped.

Scott winced, instinctively grabbing Robin before he fell over, and that was a bad idea because now it felt like he'd somehow committed to hauling his ass out of there. In the great silence, the bartender bawled out, "That was a 900-dollar bottle of Glenfiddich!"

"Then  _maybe_  you should have cut him off," Scott snapped.

This wasn't the right tack to take with the man, who curdled into an ugly scowl. "Take your friend before I call security."

"He's not—"

" _Now_."

Ah, fuck.

Should have left Robin when they'd had the chance.


	7. Alarm

The alarm went off, exploding like a tripped mine through black unconsciousness, and Robin groaned, rolling over to swipe at whatever was making the noise, but the bed ended, and he landed on the floor with a wince. He ached, the air throbbing with the pulse behind his temple, and he knew immediately this was worse, worse than yesterday because he felt like he'd just spent twenty years pickling in the cask of Amontillado. Or he'd fallen down the stairs a few dozen times and then inexplicably run a night-marathon and maybe capped off the evening with a few shots of paint thinner.

Mercifully, the alarm stopped, and the clock said 5.30, which couldn't possibly be right. Because it couldn't be morning. And this couldn't be…a hotel room?

Bits of yesterday came back to him, disconnected and out of order, a runny sludge congealing in a lump at the back of his head. The meeting. The bar.

Scott and John.

And Branson Davis.

And  _Jeff Tracy_.

Robin groaned again.

This was not good. Puking his guts out in the Kepler Building was objectively not good. And to say he'd had worse was probably a lie, because as far as public failures went, this was right up there. Not everyone had a chance to make an idiot out of themselves in front of two industry players at the same time.

And it was  _supposed_ to have been simple: present the project, an estimation of the cost, a thank-you-for-listening. No remarkable social skills required. Worst part was that Branson Davis was a decent guy who'd have given him a fair shake, if Robin hadn't ruined the carpet in his office.

And then there was Jeff Tracy. Not that Robin had ever had plans to impress him, but that bridge had most definitely burned. Why did it have to be  _him_? Jeff Tracy, the two-name monolith, the captain of industry who made Dad look like he'd been rowing a dinghy around the marina. And Robin was the kid minding the ropes on dry dock. That was probably where he should be anyway, where no one would care if he'd hit the bottle a little too hard last night.

The alarm started up again, blaring in short bursts, and that was Robin's cue to leave. He stood up slowly, dizzy, the room spinning, and it took an age before he realized he wasn't wearing his jacket, but that it was hanging neatly from a hanger in the open closet. He couldn't remember taking it off.

He took the jacket and headed downstairs, trying to smooth out the worst of the wrinkles in his suit, a futile attempt at civility which clearly didn't work because the woman at the front desk gave him a knowing look as he made his way across the lobby. "Good morning, Mr. Locke," she said, her tone a little too bright for the early hour. "Was the room to your satisfaction?"

Robin leaned stiffly against the counter and managed a smile, bare and tight. "It was fine." He cleared his throat, wishing she'd look a little less smug. "Did I…uh, did—do I need to pay for anything?"

"No, sir. Your friends paid last night."

It took far too long for those words to make sense. "What?"

"The two young men with you at the bar?"

"They…did?"

"Yes, sir."

"They paid?" Robin repeated dully.

"Yes, sir."

Robin pinched the bridge of his nose, the headache suddenly so much louder behind his eyes. Great. Awesome. The dynamic duo were at it again. And that made everything worse. "I'm going to need you to call me a cab."


	8. The Buzz

 

 

The penthouse was quiet this Saturday morning. Seeing as yesterday had been a bit of a fiasco, Jeff had hoped today would prove a touch less dramatic, a chance to work from home, catch up on some emails he'd been meaning to get to. But instead, Kyrano had called, the message short and crisp and professional:  _Expect a delivery_. And almost as soon as he'd hung up, the in-building comm had gone off, a courier awaiting permission to use the penthouse elevator for a personal delivery of a plain, manila envelope.

It had been a magazine Jeff hadn't known existed.  _The Buzz_ , the kind of glossy rag wallowing in Hollywood gossip, packaging salacious rumors of LA's latest upstarts in garish fonts and sleazy captions. There was no note attached—but then again, there didn't need to be one when the entire front cover was a blurry picture of Robin Locke, head down and clearly less than sober, propped up between Scott and John, all under the headline:

_Too Much of a Good Thing? Tracy Brothers Party with Industry Equal Robin Locke._

Jeff reached for the slim box of Tylenol he kept in his top desk drawer. In lieu of recent events, he was trying very hard not to jump to any conclusions, even if that leap felt more like a small skip to a very obvious supposition. He sighed. This was going to be a long day: regardless of the reasons for it, his sons were in the tabloids and that was a problem.

"Scott," Jeff raised his voice, "a moment of your time."

Scott appeared in the doorway, tracksuit and sneakers, one hand to his ear, adjusting an earbud. "Yeah, Dad?"

"If you please, Scott, could you explain to me why there is a 900-dollar bottle of single malt whisky charged to my account?"

Scott leaned against the doorframe, casually conversational, "Chill, Dad. It's to match the 600-dollar hotel room."

That was a little too glib for Jeff's liking. "I was going to ask about that."

"Gordon blows twenty grand a year on surfing. Virgil spends half that on his hair."

That wasn't an explanation, just a misdirect, and the first glimmer of flinty irritation sparked. Jeff picked up the magazine on his desk. "What exactly were you and John doing after I left?"

Scott frowned, noting the tone, and stepped inside, crossing the space between them and took the magazine. It was another moment before the realization dawned on him. "Son of a bitch."

In the twenty-seven years of parenting his son, Jeff had learned to go by Scott's first reaction; it was visceral and genuine and good for mapping out whatever backtracking came next. "Correct me if I'm wrong," said Jeff, "but I remember leaving you two in a reputable, well-lit restaurant."

"This isn't what it looks like."

"I've heard that before, especially from you."

"We ran into Robin, after lunch."

"And you decided to join him for a night out?"

"It was more like an afternoon. You know that they say: the more, the merrier." There was the briefest trace of penitence at the sarcasm. "We didn't drink, Dad. Robin was at the bar, and he was pretty wasted. He couldn't walk straight so we got him a room, but the hotel wouldn't take his card because he couldn't 'soberly consent' to using it," Scott made a face, "which, as you know, is just legal jargon for 'drunk off his ass.'"

Jeff sighed, the tightness in his chest undoing ever so slightly, but he wasn't entirely comforted to hear this, and Scott wasn't off the hook just yet. "That's unfortunate."

"I wouldn't call downing a pint of whisky 'unfortunate'." Scott paused, weighing the next words before adding, "We could've dropped him off in the lobby—they have contingency plans for this kind of thing—but John didn't want to leave him."

"Oh." Jeff didn't mean to sound so surprised. It wasn't fair, of course, but he'd just assumed Scott had taken the initiative, not because John wasn't capable but because that's how things had always been. Jeff felt a warmth come stealing over him, a good ache he couldn't pin to any one emotion, and the last of the stiffness began to break apart, drift away, like ice on a spring river. "I see."

Scott made a vague gesture with the magazine. "I didn't know Robin had this kind of pull. This…this isn't going to come back on Gordon, is it?"

Admittedly, that was a problem. One could draw parallels between this and two years ago, and there were pictures out there of Gordon's brief period of post-Olympic decadence. Jeff didn't need the world reminded of his son's misstep. It had been a mistake, unfortunately public, but nothing unforgivable, and certainly not something Gordon should have to carry with him always. He'd been young, naïve of what it meant to be a Name in the Media. His failure had, perhaps, taken on a different light these days. It wasn't quite the same looking back, and Jeff didn't possess his old, enduring confidence in how he'd handled things. He used to think himself the impartial judge, the patient father correcting a wayward son, but—and he flinched at this—maybe he'd just missed something in his extrapolation of Gordon's personality, somehow overlooked the glaringly obvious fact that his seventeen-year-old son hadn't known anything but pools and teammates and schedules, and setting him free from them had merely meant setting him adrift. "It won't come back on Gordon," said Jeff with some finality. No one was going to dredge the waters for lurid family secrets. "Kyrano is already mustering the troops."

Scott nodded and held up the magazine. "Can I keep this? I should tell John before he hears it from someone else."

"Be gentle."

"Yeah. Sure. That."

.

Scott headed back down the hall, stopping in the doorway to John's room. He was in bed, quiet, balled up somewhere under the heavy covers, still asleep. Scott didn't feel like going for a run anymore. There was a track he ran most mornings, a tree-lined path that took him up the high-rise walkways around Orion Heights, maybe even to the boardwalk if he was feeling the longer run.

His phone buzzed in his pocket and he pulled it out. Gordon. Early riser. Only a matter of time before he'd heard the news. It was a little past six, so he would've come back from his beach run and devoured a breakfast big enough to feed a small, militarized nation, and somewhere in that span of time someone had probably shoved a copy of  _The Buzz_  under his nose and told him his older brothers had made the cover. The thought of Gordon choking on his avocado toast was almost enough to make up for the picture.

[Gordon: what are you doing to John?]

_To_  John. Not  _with_  John. As if Scott could make John do anything he didn't want to. As if  _anyone_  could.

[Scott: rounding out his college career.]

[Gordon: what?]

[Scott: pub crawl, Gordo.]

[Gordon: wut]

[Scott: did you know John can do a keg stand?]

There was a pause in the messaging, Gordon working out the validity of that statement.

[Gordon: now I know you're lying]

[Gordon: is he okay?]

[Scott: he's fine. sleeping. not hungover.]

[Gordon: maybe I should come down]

[Gordon: yeah, I should come down]

[Gordon: should I come down?]

[Scott: and do what?]

[Gordon: I dunno]

[Gordon: something]

[Gordon: how do you know Robin Locke?]

[Scott: I don't. John doesn't.]

[Gordon: paper says otherwise]

[Scott: then it must be true]

[Gordon: I heard he sank a yacht]

[Scott: not last night]

[Gordon: hardy har-har]

[Scott: we played him in poker]

That was fudging the timeline a bit, abbreviating the last two days into something that wouldn't require a chronological map of Robin's bad decisions.

[Gordon: you and John?]

[Scott: he invited us]

[Gordon: always a bad idea]

[Gordon: so John's really okay?]

Scott hesitated, glancing at John again. He was fine, in a manner of speaking. Yesterday had tired him out, but dragging a half-conscious Robin through a hotel lobby would probably do that to anyone.

[Scott: yeah. don't worry about it. we have Kyrano.]

[Gordon: oh shit. Dad set him loose?]

Scott snorted. Accurate, but probably not a descriptor Dad would approve of. Kyrano was the gatekeeper to Dad's dog-yard of blood-thirsty lawyers; Kyrano was a knife in a Savile Row suit, one of Dad's acquisitions from somewhere deeply mysterious, a department whose motto must have been  _Burn Everything_ , because that is what Kyrano had set about doing after Gordon's bender. He'd been the unholy demon on the hill, wreathed in smoke, the ravages of battle unfolding below him. There were still pictures out there, but not nearly as many as there could have been, because Kyrano was efficient, his plan of attack two-pronged: Contain and Distract. Gordon had been tidied away to college and Virgil subbed in, suiting up to walk the line with Dad at relatively mundane functions: good-cause, black-tie dinners carefully engineered to offset bad press.

And thanks to Robin, Scott would now have his fair share of those to look forward to. He pitched the magazine at John and managed to smack him right in the head. Couldn't have hurt, but John groaned dramatically, sitting up, bleary-eyed and slow in the way he never was in public. He'd slept face-first in his pillow and his red hair looked ridiculous. "Scott?"

"Morning, sunshine."

John picked up the magazine limply, unsure what he was looking at. He probably wasn't awake enough to process the implications of seeing himself on the cover, and maybe it wasn't fair to bring all this up now, at six in the morning, and Scott should wait until John was fed and showered and wearing something other than pajamas. But what good was being the older brother if Scott never used his privilege of being just a little bit of a prick?

"So,  _apparently_ ," Scott went on before John had anything to say, "we're now part of Robin's little band of blowhards. It's weird, but I have this sudden urge to go to Ibiza. You think Dad will let me take the jet?"

John said nothing, and that probably meant his train of thought had derailed somewhere between the stations, which was  _just fine_  because Scott needed to divert his attention anyway, away from the track that would inevitably dead-end in a repeat performance of yesterday's mental circles.

Scott wandered over to the bookshelf in an attempt to be deliberately cavalier about the whole thing. There was the off chance that John might think this was all his fault—and it kinda was—but Scott wasn't about to put that on him. "Kyrano's on the job, by the way," he added. "Probably breaking out the boiling oil and fingerscrews as we speak."

There was an assortment of things on the bookshelf, John's growing collection of whatever random crap he found interesting. All his other stuff was in Kansas, and he hadn't brought anything with him from Boston, so this was all new, a small hoard amassed over the last six months sometime between work and home. A shogi board, a miniature of the USS Enterprise,  _The Colossal Book of Mathematics_ , a bonsai tree, a NASA baseball cap, and for some unknown reason, Scott's dog-eared copy of  _The Silmarillion_. Which he'd been looking for.

"Does Dad know?"

Scott turned back to John. He'd have thought the mention of Kyrano would imply their father had already been informed, but evidently John needed Scott to spell it out for him. "Yeah. I told him what happened. He's not ecstatic about the association, but it's not like we knew this was going to happen."

"He's not mad?"

"Why would he be mad? You didn't do anything. Robin was the one getting hammered in broad daylight."

John looked down at the magazine again, hesitant. "Maybe that's just another way of walking into traffic."

"What?"

"I mean…" said John, again hedging, "I understand the impulse."

" _You_  understand the impulse to get shit-faced before noon? Uh-huh. You let me know when you're feeling the urge to day-drink and I'll join you." Scott didn't understand this hang-up. John did have the extraordinary ability to obsess, but usually about things that made sense. Like building the AI for his sixth-grade science fair. Or spending the whole summer before ninth grade putting together a working replica of the Mars Curiosity Rover's megawatt infrared laser. Their very own 'friendly neighborhood death ray' as Gordon put it, after John blew the basement door off its hinges, and Dad retired the project 'indefinitely.'

But those obsessions had all been well within the norm of his little brother's interests, the perfect overlap of fascination and fixation slotting into John's affinity for details, an instinct honed to a fine point in Harvard before the tip had splintered, and now John seemed to catch on things that didn't matter, that  _shouldn't_  matter, as if he couldn't quite sort the necessary from the unimportant.

Scott didn't know what to do with that, so instead he said, "Come on, Johnny. Get up. We're going for a run."

Because running involved putting on clothes and lacing up sneakers and  _actually going outside_ , which was…something. Maybe a shadow of a viable plan.

And if it gave Scott the slightest petty pleasure to watch his little brother huff along the better part of the boardwalk, then that was entirely coincidental.


	9. Duncan

A white-knuckle cab ride later and Robin had made it to the office. He could go home, but that was about as unappealing as anything else, and the office had everything he needed, a couch and a shower and a fridge Fanny kept stocked with yoghurt. Not that his stomach was feeling up to having visitors, now or any time in the near future. He shut the door to the cab and vaguely wondered what had happened to yesterday's driverless car, if the AI had waited an appropriate amount of time before deciding to return to the basement docking bay on its own.

The office building was tinted glass, a mirror to the pinking sky of early morning, and the plaza was empty, except for a lone security guard in the distance, and Robin was rather happy there was only the automated voice to greet him, the door scanner triggering preemptively, "Robin Locke. Access granted."

The doors slid back in a rush of cool air to reveal the atrium, also empty, and there was nothing to stop him from going in except for a muted noise coming from somewhere to his left, a raspy meow, and he turned to see Mr. Tubbs come wandering out from somewhere, the feline silhouette ruined by the fact that he was enormously fat. The old tabby hadn't come around in a while, but Robin needn't have worried: Mr. Tubbs was impossibly fatter than before, which wasn't surprising considering his steady diet of food cart falafel and quesadillas.

"Long time, no see, Tubbsy."

Mr. Tubbs came over to rub against his legs.

"You look good."

Mr. Tubbs meowed.

"Out of shape?" Robin squatted down to scratch him around the ears. "No, no, I think you're being too hard on yourself. Round  _is_  a shape." He cupped the little face in his hands, rubbing a thumb over the dirty nose. "You staying or just passing through?"

Mr. Tubbs meowed again, and having fulfilled the obligatory greeting, pulled away and sauntered past him through the open doors of the building, as if Robin was merely an appendage to working the scanner, a doorman whose usefulness could be measured in the reach of his opposable thumbs. Mr. Tubbs stopped about half-way through the atrium to give him one last conspiratorial slow-blink before wandering off, and Robin had to laugh, which was a mistake because it sent a spike of pain up his skull. He groaned. Aspirin. He needed aspirin. And water to scrub the dry rind of regret from the back of his tongue.

The usual suck of g-force in the elevator made him slightly ill, and Robin had never been so appreciative of the muted color scheme in his office. Duncan was always going on about 'making it your own, Robin' and 'it's already been a year, Robin' and  _apparently_ , that stack of paperwork in the middle of the floor didn't count, but  _today_ —on this blessed day in history—his office was safe harbor, and he a ship drifting gently into port, into the embrace of blues and greys, tastefully empty shelves as far as the eye could see, a space blissfully devoid of anything to break his line of vision. There was just that single copy of  _Tintin in Tibet_  on the shelf in the corner—a regretful attempt at heeding Duncan's advice—and it was categorically offensive, the red in the cover a needle to the eye.

Someone had left the windows tinted—Fanny?—and the morning light was filtering in at half-opacity, obscuring the view outside, and surely that woman deserved flowers. Robin headed for the bathroom, and it was all elegant chrome and cool, grey tiles, the rainfall showerhead beckoning with its silver gleam, but the thought of washing up seemed laborious—unbuttoning all those buttons on his shirt was completely unreasonable. He turned on the tap in the sink and drank straight from it, turned it up to hot and splashed water on his face.

Everything was groggy and awful, and that small creature in his head had built a nest by now and gotten married, opened a corner shop and had kids, gone on vacation and left the eldest in charge, the little genius who'd promptly thrown a rager and trashed the house, which was why Robin felt slow and stupid: because his brain was trash, an unwatered lawn of solo cups and broken dreams.

The mirror was unkind. Robin looked terrible, as if he hadn't slept at all, even though it was 6:17, which meant—he checked his watch, some unwilling part of his brain sluggishly doing the math—he'd had  _sixteen hours_  of sleep, the first decent night's rest in months, and he  _still_  felt like crap.

He sighed and turned off the bathroom light and went back to his desk, sinking into the comfort of his ergonomic chair. The usual mess of papers on his desk had been straightened, divided into neat piles of varying importance, paper copies because he couldn't stand staring at a screen all day. There was a fresh stack of files to go through, hot off the presses, with a note attached that he couldn't bring himself to read. Probably Fanny reminding him of some pressing business that needed his attention, a signature that couldn't wait. She might think it was a bit strange he'd never come back to work after the meeting. Flowers might remedy that too. A big bouquet on her desk to distract from the fact that her boss was possibly taking a nap on the couch.

The peace of his office was a fragile thing, like a still-poaching egg, and maybe it was too much to ask for a quiet day at work, because the lights turned on—or someone untinted the windows—and a horrible, solar brightness flooded the room. Robin winced, his eyeballs shriveling back into their sockets, and he heard his name, and Duncan had come through the door, brisk and bright and impeccably dressed. Robin wished suddenly he'd taken that shower after all, because having Duncan walk in on him in the office in a towel would seem so much more like Robin had been up at the crack of dawn to get started on those budget reports, and less like he'd crawled onto the premises out of some primordial need to pretend yesterday hadn't happened.

"Duncan!" said Robin, overly cheerful, and he had to clear his throat to work his voice down an octave before he tried again. "What are you doing here?" Duncan was immaculate in charcoal grey, the crease in his steam-pressed pants so sharp it could give a man a close shave. He looked nothing like a person should after they'd stepped off the red-eye from Paris, which just wasn't fair. "I thought you weren't supposed to be back until…uh, Wednesday?"

Robin made a half-hearted attempt at standing, but he needn't have bothered because Duncan had come straight for the desk.

"Tuesday," Duncan corrected, unusually brusque, and smacked a magazine down on the papers in front of Robin. "I'm gone for barely a week and you pull  _this_?"

Robin sat back down, confused. "What?"

"You can't afford this kind of attention."

Robin picked up the magazine, a dim recognition stirring at the name.  _The Buzz_. Why did that sound familiar? "Isn't this the…" he trailed off, distracted by the picture. "That's me."

"And the Tracys," said Duncan, the living embodiment of a pinched nerve. "You're surprised?"

Robin grimaced, the hazy recollection of yesterday coming back to him—a memory of hands on his shoulders, someone helping him out of his jacket. He felt his heart drop, sliding into some unfriendly pit of realization: Scott and John had walked him to his room. Which, quite frankly, didn't make sense because he'd said some things—couldn't remember what exactly, but if past experience was anything to go by, probably nothing good. Nothing that could've been mistaken for an open invitation to help. Okay, so he'd had a bit too much, but why couldn't they just have been assholes about it, like your average Tom, Dick, and Harry? Wasn't it enough to pay for the room? Leave it to a Tracy to pull the no-holds-barred good-samaritan routine:  _Ah, I see you are in need of some assistance there, hapless citizen. It is I, Scott Tracy—protector of innocents—conveniently appearing to escort you to your room. Pay me? Oh, no no. I have no need for such earthly trinkets. Your unending adoration is thanks enough._

"How could you let this happen?"

Robin cringed. "It wasn't supposed to." And that, at least, was true. "Things got a bit…out of hand."

"A bit?"

"It's only the one picture."

"On the  _front cove_ r, Robin. And it's never just one. You know there are other pictures out there, more telling than this, and the press has never needed much reason to air them out. It's how they work. They don't do nuance. I don't want this company to be a bit of breakfast entertainment on Good Morning America."

"It's not that bad, is it?" Robin didn't look too closely at the captions. "I mean, sure, the Tracy wunderkind slummin' it with Robin Locke does have a certain appeal, but I can't possibly be  _that_  interesting, can I? I'm just a guy in a suit. Granted a really nice suit but…"

Duncan gave him a look that suggested he thought Robin might've taken abrupt leave of his senses. "It's been almost a year, Robin.  _Of course_  you're interesting. This anniversary is important to the company. The world is expecting a quiet commemoration—not you showing up in the tabloids, completely legless. What do you think that says about the state of things?"

Robin tried not to flinch at the question. "That people are forgiving and can overlook a slight misstep?"

Duncan wasn't the type to roll his eyes, but everything about him said he wanted to. "It implies you're not someone to be taken seriously. That you're not doing your job."

"But I am." All those meetings, those countless, interminable sit-downs with investors had to count for something, right?

Duncan passed a hand over his eyes, exasperated. "My personal knowledge of your office hours has very little bearing on media perception."

"So what do I do?"

"Nothing." Duncan took out a black notebook and pen from his inner breast pocket. "The least we can hope for is containment. You're going to keep your head down until this all blows over." He pointedly opened a page in his notebook and crossed something out. "There will be no interviews. And I'm going to have to ask you to stay away from the Tracys."

Ah, good ol' Duncan, thinking Robin wanted anything to do with the Gruesome Twosome after yesterday. Understandable, seeing as the man didn't have the play-by-play of yesterday's proceedings, and telling him now—depriving him of the sweet assumption that Robin had just been getting blitzed at some dumb party—just seemed cruel. "But, Duncan—we had  _plans_. We were gonna go to Vegas together. This is really putting a dent in my weekend."

Duncan narrowed his eyes at him, transparently unamused at the levity. "I wasn't even aware you knew them."

"Oh, we go way back." All the way to Thursday. "We've recently reconnected."

"I'd rather you didn't."

"But I thought you'd  _like_  the idea of me hobnobbing with my betters."

"Not like this. Not when you risk losing the little ground you've gained this year. The Tracys have considerably more money to sink into saving their reputation.  _If_  it needed saving. Which it  _does_   _not_." Duncan meant, of course, the fact that these were the Tracy Brothers they were talking about—Scott Tracy, grandmaster of the skies, and his lord-of-the-poindexters brother—eldest scions of the great Jeff Tracy, Lord of LA. "Robin, you don't have the privilege of people giving you the benefit of the doubt. Any association with the Tracys would be tabloid fodder, at best. You can make other friends."

That felt strangely optimistic. "Right."

"And how did your meeting with Branson Davis go?"

The switch in topics was jarring, and Robin prickled, the vague malaise stealing back over him. One would think that with the week in Paris and Robin's unscheduled appearance in  _The Buzz_ , Duncan might've let it slip his mind. But of course, the man was the consummate professional: far be it from him to enjoy the city of lights with a fresh baguette under his arm on a stroll along the Seine.

"There  _was_  a meeting," said Robin. "And I did see Branson Davis there. In that meeting."

The inevitable rising disappointment. "And?"

"It's probably going to be one of those don't-call-us-we'll-call-you kind of deals." Robin had to hurry this along. "You see, the Tracys showed up and I got a bit, uh…flustered and—"

"Wait." Duncan was confused. "The Tracys were  _at_ the meeting? Why?"

"I don't know. Branson Davis seemed to think we'd have something in common." If they didn't before, they now had the shared memory of Robin spiffing his biscuits all over that heinous carpet. "But if you were hoping to toss the ol' pigskin around with Jeff Tracy at the next barbecue, I'd take that off the list." The image of Duncan trying to tempt Jeff Tracy to a game of football was ridiculous, and Robin let out a nervous laugh. "Could you imagine what that cookout would look like? Peacocks on the lawn. Champagne fountains. A sixty-foot ice swan. Scott probably parachutes in halfway through the hors d'oeuvres just because he can. And the great Jeff Tracy mannning the fire pit because—well, why have a steak when you can slow-roast the fattened calf?"

Duncan's brow furrowed into a small canyon of disbelief. "You think this is funny?

"No, not really," said Robin, dithering because he was drawing a blank, gazing into a vast deficit of excuses, "but you see, that's—that's why I went to talk to Scott and John afterwards."

"Really?"

Robin nodded stiffly. That's not what he'd meant to say, but it was too late to bail out now. "Yeah. I was thinking I could maybe change their mind, but I'm not sure I made any headway."

"Because you were drinking."

"To be fair," Robin hedged, perfectly aware of the fact that he was still digging his own grave, just in a slightly different shape than usual, "we were all drinking. And I've learned you do  _not_  want to get between John and his single highball glass of vodka cranberry." By now, Duncan was completely, wildly perplexed, because that story probably didn't make sense. Maybe if he shut one eye and didn't stand too close, it would resemble something that wasn't worth pursuing. "So, really, Duncan, you could say I was showing initiative," Robin finished.

"You expect me to appreciate the effort?"

"Isn't life about the small victories?"

Duncan took a deep breath and let it out slowly, the lungful of air doing nothing to dissipate his irritation. "I shouldn't have to explain to you why taking Jeff Tracy's sons out on a binge is a bad idea. And if you can't see that, then I don't even know where to start." He put a hand to the magazine. "This  _cannot_  happen again."

Robin nodded dumbly, and he felt awful, and not just because some nocturnal creature had scooped out his brains with a melon baller. "It won't. Trust me."

"I want to," said Duncan and his ire seemed to lessen incrementally, an easing so subtle Robin might have imagined it. Duncan swept up the magazine, folded it in half with a brittle snap and tucked it under his arm, heading for the door, strides measured and efficient. Robin knew from experience he was already far ahead of him, planning the week, rearranging the schedule to accommodate for the reality that Robin was a seasoned idiot.

The glass doors of the office didn't slam; the soft-close system made them a soundless arc in slow-motion, and the silence in Duncan's wake was worse than his bluster, a static still after the storm, the hush of a ruined landscape. Robin buried his head in his hands. This wasn't how today was supposed to go. Not that he'd had much of a plan for…well, anything really, not when every day was a slow-moving procession of unfolding balance sheets.

"Sir?"

Fanny's voice. But that couldn't be right because it was Saturday, and this time he knew for a fact that it was Saturday, and she shouldn't be here. But she was and that meant she'd been called in by someone In the Know. Probably Duncan. Robin hated to think how that conversation had gone. "I know it's Saturday, Fanny, and you were looking forward to a weekend free of handholding, but could you possibly check to make sure your boss hasn't completely lost his mind?"

He raised his head slowly. Fanny was standing by the desk, brown cardigan, frizzy red hair, a bottle of aspirin in one hand and an envelope in the other, because The Show Must Go On. "Fanny. You're here." He flushed. "I…I just…I was having a moment."

She nodded. "We all have them, sir."

Not like this.

She held out the envelope. "This came for you."

Robin sighed. It couldn't wait, he supposed. If she wasn't here he could have thrown himself on the couch and let himself be swallowed by the cushions, limboed into the place where spare change and TV remotes went to die; but he was at the office, fully-dressed, and that was usually enough to signal the start of a work day. He took the envelope. Honestly, it was probably better this way. It'd give him something else to think about. "Thanks," he said, not looking at her. "I guess Duncan told you that I—that yesterday…b-but you really didn't have to come in. I'm fine. As you can see."

"Yes, sir."

Robin worked the flap open on the envelope and pulled out the stiff card. "And I'm just going to get some work done, nothing strenuous, so you could just go home and…" he was sidetracked by the name on the card.

Lyria Hotel. It was one of those surveys that came with the room. They must really be hard up for reviews if they were tracking down their drunken guests to fill them out. He turned it over. The comments section at the bottom was filled in, a message so neatly printed it took him a moment to register that it was handwritten:

_Sully's, 524 S Main St,_

_Wednesday, 20:00_

_I would like to have a conversation. – John_

Robin stopped.

John? As in John Tracy? As in little brother of the guy voted most likely to have been assembled in a military lab? John wanted to have a conversation. About what? Yesterday? Was there anything left unsaid?

"Sir?"

Robin glanced up. He realized he was clutching the card hard enough for Fanny to be concerned, and he should probably play that off, assure her he was  _fine_ and  _never been better_  and  _can't you tell how perfectly all right I am_ , but instead he heard himself say, "What's Sully's?"

"It's a diner."

"Is it? How do you know that?"

"I've been there." Fanny tilted her head in mild curiosity. "They have good waffles."

John wanted to meet in a diner? Robin hadn't really pegged him for a late-night munchies kind of guy. This was  _John Tracy_ , after all—human sponge for knowledge, filter-feeding off the universal energies while the rest of his class had been making pedestrian attempts at baking soda volcanoes. Robin had a fleeting image of him strategically garrisoned in one of the back booths, fortified behind a Helm's Deep of short-orders in some kind of power play to establish rank. Not that he needed a power play. With a name like that, he just had to show up for the world to fall at his feet. Or fall over, more likely, because catching a glimpse of John in public was the Tracy equivalent of a blue moon.

Robin stared at the card.

Or maybe this was all a ruse, and John had no intention of meeting there at all, and Robin would be walking into an empty diner to wait for someone that wasn't going to show, with Scott and John somewhere else, high-fiving each other for their 'awesome prank, bro'.

But…that didn't make sense either.

They had paid for his room. They had  _helped_. Even when no one had asked them to.

Fanny was giving him a look. Maybe she thought he'd cracked. Possibly he had. Possibly he'd wandered into and out of an alternate dimension where John Tracy wanted a moment of his time.


	10. Sully's

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been looking at this too long and can't see the forest for the trees. It's a pretty meaty chapter, even if it isn't particularly long, so I figured it's better to set it free and let you have something to chew over in the meanwhile. As always, comments are always appreciated.

 

 

The decaf cup of coffee had gone cold on the table. John picked up the menu again, even though he knew it by heart and had ordered pancakes here enough times for it to be 'the usual'. He'd been distracted at work for a solid three days now, and today he'd mislabeled two separate sheets of notes before Brains had kindly inquired if he was 'quite all right', to which John had blushed and stammered out something about being sorry and doing better, even though the last part was a lie and they both knew it. That was maybe the worst part about the last six months. That everything about him was obvious, easy to read, surface level. He'd been deliberate once. He'd been light and thin and effortless in streamlined slacks, the preppy Ivy League lending itself to looking neat and trim and fashionably nonchalant in a way that wasn't fifteen pounds underweight.

But these days everything was slow and heavy, and some mornings there was seemed to be a localized gravitational shift that followed him around and he couldn't pretend otherwise. Even when pretending had become second nature in the last two years. Pretending that going home for the holidays wasn't a slog through family politics, that he wasn't jealous of Gordon getting off easy, getting his school of choice, getting everything handed to him on a silver platter, just because he'd set the bar so low everyone was pleasantly surprised when he put in the least bit of effort. Pretending Harvard was fine and classes were interesting and that the future wasn't just a grey wall to beat his head against from time to time. That he was okay with sticking it out to graduation, because that's what Dad had wanted, right? The business degree. The bragging rights to having another son fulfilling his ambition.

John took a breath, carefully pushing that thought aside before it slid down the old rut in his neural pathways, before the familiar, anxious hum started up in his chest and became something worse.

"Can I get you a refill, hun?"

John started unintentionally at the intrusion and glanced up at the waitress, blushing immediately at the thought of having started at all because it seemed to imply something he wasn't. He hadn't noticed her come by, coffee pot in hand, and he should probably know her name, seeing as he'd come here enough times to be considered something of a regular. She was middle aged, dressed in a pastel green uniform with a nameplate above the embroidered Sully's. Gloria. Her name was Gloria.

"No, thank you." John shook his head. "I'm, uh—I don't need anything."

She nodded at the empty seat across from him. "Where's your friend?"

"Friend?" It took him a second to realize she meant Brains. "Oh, he's not—" a friend, exactly. That would be presumptuous to say out loud, and John felt keenly he needed to correct her, set right the assumption, point out that Brains was his boss and John merely his assistant, a position he'd lucked into because Dad had needed to put him somewhere during his recovery, somewhere John would do the least amount of damage if he misplaced notes or made bad coffee or had the occasional panic attack in the office bathroom. Dad—being Dad—had snapped his fingers and made it happen, and Brains couldn't have refused a direct order from Jeff Tracy even if he'd wanted to.

All things considered, Brains had been a remarkably good sport about John's feeble attempts at being useful around the office. He didn't seem to mind when John didn't have the right answers, or any answers at all, and John wondered if Dad had known that's what he'd needed: Brains' quiet focus, so different from Scott's bombast or Dad's steely way of Getting Things Done. Brains was polite and soft-spoken and appropriately worried about John's health ever since he'd confessed why he was here, why he'd been pulled out of Harvard so abruptly and pigeonholed into a menial position at Tracy HQ. Brains had been relieved at the confession then, not angry or disappointed or ready to ask for a new assistant. Relieved. Happy to help, happy to sit down and talk things over, happy to make John a cup of decaf coffee—which meant a lot coming from the man who specially ordered his beans from San Francisco and considered decaffeinated anything a minor human travesty.

Maybe Brains was just satisfied to finally have some answers. Maybe John had finally fitted into some rich kid template that was easier to understand—the pill-popping Harvard dropout who couldn't hack it in the big leagues. Even if that was all the concern was—professional courtesy, a kind of loyal duty to making sure the boss's son didn't wilt from lack of attention—John still appreciated the last six months.

But Gloria probably wasn't looking for a treatise to what had been a very simple question, so John cleared his throat, finishing meekly, "I'm waiting for someone else actually."

He didn't have to worry about any follow-up questions. Gloria was already departing. "All right, sugar," she said over her shoulder. "You just holler when you need me."

John checked his watch again.

20:10.

Robin was ten minutes late, but then again, he'd been twenty minutes late to Branson Davis, and that had been Official Business. And this was...well, John didn't actually know what this was. A gut feeling maybe, and he didn't go by those. That was Scott's territory. Gordon's too. That's probably what had tipped Gordon off the weekend in Harvard, some innate sense of unease that told him to have another look at the little bottle of not-aspirin in the medicine cabinet and reassess his big brother, the thin wrists, the empty apartment. Gordon had known what to do then, what to say and how to say it.

John had almost called him yesterday for advice, but there wasn't any way to go about the subject of Robin Locke without raising a few eyebrows, and Gordon, out of some well-meaning instinct, would say something to someone, probably Scott, and that would be the end of doing anything off the books. So the initial missive to Robin had to be improvised. John had snagged the survey card from the desk in the hotel room and filled it out in the lobby, the moving parts of the plan falling into place like tumblers in a lock, a cascading sequence of details: Sully's. Wednesday. Eight o'clock.

Wednesday to avoid the scheduling conflicts of a weekend.

Sully's because it was neutral territory, the nebulous land between work and home, and far enough off the grid to hold a conversation without the threat of Scott kicking down the doors, guns blazing, to make it abundantly clear just how dumb of an idea he thought this was.

Which it was, undoubtedly. John had known that even as he'd sidled over to the front desk under the guise of settling any last details with the concierge, pushing a message at him to send to Robin's office the next morning. Standing there at the hotel counter, John had felt a distant part of his brain shift into gear, a rusty defense mechanism sparking back to life, the simple risk-benefit ratio calculating out the odds of this single, cryptic dispatch ever being discovered, let alone understood by anyone who mattered. Scott had already headed out to get the keys from the valet, convinced this whole episode had played itself out, and John just hadn't given him a reason to believe otherwise.

Maybe that was slipping back into old habits—letting Scott assume what he wanted of the silence—and maybe John shouldn't have felt the familiar thrill at the misdirect; but he'd had eighteen months' worth of practice, practically a lifetime of segregating information into soundbites, divvying up portions of his life for inspection. There had been an art to dropping little details of Harvard into phone conversations, enough information to let Dad and Scott and Virgil and Alan draw conclusions of a life better than the sum of its parts. John had preferred texting. Words could be revised before hitting send. Words didn't break when Grandma called to ask if school was 'treating you all right, sweetheart?'

John didn't need to check his watch again to know the time. The clock on the wall behind the counter was perfectly in his line of sight, the glass smudged with a grease stain no one had bothered to wipe away.

20.20.

For the better part of the evening, he'd been avidly _not_ considering the possibility Robin might not show, even though the odds of it happening were well within reason. Especially after Friday. John couldn't remember exactly what Dad had said the meeting would be about, but he hadn't needed much convincing to go: this was Branson Davis, chief engineer on the Helia, and maybe John had hoped he'd digress into some anecdote about the mission.

But nowhere in the lead-up to that morning had Robin ever been mentioned.

John shifted in his seat, uncomfortable. Technically, Scott was right. They couldn't have known Robin would show. And Robin had looked about as surprised as anyone else to find himself in the room, as if he'd been unexpectedly shoved inside and told to improvise, which couldn't have been the case at all, not with people like Branson Davis, who were big enough and busy enough to require lengthy negotiations between respective assistants to pin him down for an appointment. And if the man was anything like Dad, then the meeting would have been scheduled weeks ago, maybe even months, and Robin should have been up late going over his presentation, not spending the evening at some dubious, late-night poker game with a drink in his hand.

Robin had been an idiot. Knowing that should have made John feel better, absolve the lingering worry, clear things up enough for him to walk it off, imitate Scott's disinterest, laugh at the ridiculous headline that wasn't close to any part of the truth.

Yet John was here, in a window booth at Sully's, waiting for a conversation he was criminally underprepared to have. Kyrano would say never go into a fight unarmed, and John could have done his research, looked up a few salient details about the opposing party just to have them up his sleeve, in case things took a turn for the worse. Because that was the reasonable thing to do: expect the worst, cover the exits. John was good at finding what he needed. He was fairly convinced a cursory search would be enough to yield unending possibilities for leverage.

And an obituary he didn't want to read.

John was just about to check his watch again when the bell jangled and the door swung open and Robin stepped inside, twenty-five minutes late.


	11. Decaf

Surprise, again, surprisingly; the same barely-mastered disbelief Robin had worn to Branson Davis's office, and now in Sully's, the same expression, as if there had been any doubt in John's invitation, as if the details of time and place hadn't been explicit. There was no reason for Robin to look so startled, not when he'd come all the way here on his own free will. Yet he had stopped in his tracks, stunned out of locomotion. "John, you're…here." It probably wasn't supposed to sound so much like a question. "I wasn't sure you…" he glanced around the diner, as if the empty booths could tell him something, "but you did. I mean, you  _are_. Here." He flinched, seeming to recognize the redundancy in the statement. "Clearly."

By the fluorescent light of Sully's, Robin was painfully sober. The bravado from the poker game was gone; the liquid courage from Friday's bender had run its course—another unspoken prerequisite for the meeting, another reason John had picked Wednesday, the mundane middle of the week. And it had worked: Robin had dried up enough to be nervous, and he  _was_  nervous, a weakness John would have picked apart at Harvard because he'd always gone for the jugular: that was Business. That was Harvard. It had been easy then, and he'd been good at it, had enjoyed being ruthless and sharp and pitiless as the sun.

But it wasn't easy now, when Robin stood a few feet from him, and the conversation John had vaguely imagined lodged somewhere in his upper diaphragm. He made some sort of gesture at the empty seat across from him, and Robin took the invitation and approached, a brief, uncertain pause before he slid stiffly into the seat across from John, looking slightly like he'd sat on something sharp.

John had meant to open with something neutral, a buffer of harmless small talk to flesh out the conversation, but there was no Venn diagram of common ground between them, no overlap of social circles, except for the party in the Hamptons, which was too faded to mine for information anyway, and all John could really remember of that day was Virgil burning himself to a crisp in the hotel pool and Scott buying out the gift shop's supply of aloe. So it was a surprise when John heard himself say, completely without preamble, "You didn't think I'd be here?"

"Ah. Well." Robin didn't look at him directly. "Yeah. Kinda."

"Why?"

"Oh, you know. You're a busy guy."

Not that busy. "But I asked you to come."

Robin nodded once, slowly. "So you did." He clasped his hands on the table, a little too tightly to be relaxed. "I just didn't know if there was anything left to say after our…stirring reunion."

That was too vague for John to know which day he meant, but there wasn't time to clarify because Gloria had drifted from her position behind the counter, a cup and saucer in one hand, the same plain ceramic cup John had sitting in front of him. She placed the cup and saucer in front of Robin and glanced at John, who suddenly felt a pressing obligation to finish the coffee at the bottom of his cup.

"Can I get you boys anything?" Gloria fished a pen and notebook from her apron pocket. "Another decaf?"

Decaf. The word seemed louder than the others.  _Decaf_  because it was Gordon's idea to go off uppers completely, even the socially sanctioned ones. Decaf, in any other setting a minor detail, unobtrusive, perhaps a lifestyle change, or maybe just the best option at this time of night. But sitting across from Robin, it seemed more conspicuous somehow, as if it would sound the alarm and signal the way back to Harvard. Which was ridiculous, admittedly. John downed the cold dregs of his coffee, and they were predictably terrible. He set the cup back on the saucer, hoping the motion came across as offhand and indifferent. "Please."

Gloria turned her attention to Robin. "And what about you, Mr. Big Spender?"

Robin frowned in confusion. "Huh?"

"We've met."

"We have?"

"A few weeks ago. You ordered a cheeseburger at four in the morning."

"I did?"

"Left a five-hundred-dollar tip. You asked me to dance but I declined, on account of the fact that you'd probably fall over." Gloria clicked her pen, unruffled. "Coffee, then?"

Robin looked like he'd bitten into a lemon. "Sure."

"Decaf?"

Robin didn't answer this time so Gloria took his silence for accord and turned to John. "Anything else I can get you, hun? Milk? Sugar?"

It would probably be rude to decline the offer. "Cream?"

Gloria slipped the notebook and pen back into her apron pocket. "Coffee for the two gentlemen. I'll be back," she dead-eyed them both, "if only to be part of this scintillating conversation."

She departed, and John watched her amble over to the counter with the ease of someone taking their time. Robin had grabbed the menu, and John probably shouldn't ask but—"Does that happen a lot?"

Robin was studying the dessert section with the intense interest of someone avoiding the topic. "I don't usually get decaf." Maybe there was a certain sense of futility about defending the obvious, because he cleared his throat and tried to clarify, "To be fair, it was probably a Friday. I mean, not that last Friday was representative of  _all_  Fridays. Because that wouldn't be—" he didn't know how to finish the thought, so he started a new one. "For the record, Locke Labs does not associate itself with that kind of attention. It's just not an image conducive to the brand."

That sounded like a disclaimer, some latent PR training surfacing from the murky depths, and it occurred to John there might have been consequences on Robin's end of things, which was a new thought entirely—that Robin might have been given the lecture John was spared, because John was always being spared the full force of anything these days. Dad hadn't welcomed the idea of his sons being plastered across the front page of a gaudy rag, but he hadn't said anything. Gordon, after his four-month misadventure, had been subjected to a crash course in media training with Kyrano, a lesson Gordon had only described as 'comprehensive', suspiciously scant of detail for someone who'd spend half an hour eulogizing his lunch.

"Actually," said John, "that's why I asked you here. It's about Friday."  _Friday_  specifically, not Thursday, because Thursday was a knot John didn't want to unpick, not until he'd gotten a better read off Robin, collected a few more details, figured out how much he remembered of the poker game. "It wasn't ideal."

Robin winced. "Not really, no."

John took a breath, bracing himself. "The meeting with Branson Davis—you have to know it wasn't on purpose. We honestly didn't know you were going to be there."

Robin wasn't expecting the change in subject. "What?"

"I realize it might have come across like some…grand scheme or something, especially after—after what happened. But I swear it wasn't." That was vague, so diplomatically all-encompassing John could feel himself blush. "And I just wanted to say I'm sorry for the way things turned out. I don't feel good about it."

"What?"

"I'm sorry," John repeated, slower this time because Robin looked as if he might have lost the thread of the conversation, "Really, I am. And you don't have to believe me, but I need to say it."

Robin seemed to suffer from a minor technical malfunction, freezing with the menu in his hands, and it was probably a good thing Gloria returned, intermission made flesh, a coffee pot in one hand and a small jug of cream in the other. She set the jug down on the table, exactly halfway between them, and glanced at Robin. "You all right there, sugar?" She raised one thin, penciled-in eyebrow. "Bowled over by our all-day breakfast specials, no doubt. Glad to see fine dining hasn't been lost on the youth." She filled their cups. "Decaf, as requested. And there's your cream. Pairs well with our commercially ground coffee beans."

The interruption was brief, and Gloria left almost as soon as she had appeared, a last, unconcerned 'take your time, boys' and she was already sauntering back to her spot behind the counter at a pace that would give even Robin enough time to figure out what to say next. John reached for the cream jug and poured a substantial amount into his cup, more than necessary, the ribbon of cream snaking its way through the black ether, a tiny microcosm of a nebula, Hubble gazing upon the Pillars of Creation, and that's how long this was taking—time had dilated, mushrooming out into a stillness where the grease-stained clock had stopped, and a thousand years had passed, and John had been sitting at this table forever, in the deep infinity of nothing, a cosmic gulf of time where he waited for Robin to speak.

Deliberately careful, Robin set the menu aside. "I wasn't expecting that."

John took the spoon from his saucer and stirred his coffee, a staged performance. "What were you expecting?"

"Honestly?" A slight shift in posture, an easing around the shoulders. "I don't know. I just assumed we'd come to a natural parting of ways." There was a delicate subtlety to the understatement. Robin glanced away to some unfixed point by the counter, gaze eventually wandering over to the far end of the diner and back. "And I wasn't sure I had the place right. Isn't Sully's a bit off the beaten track for a Tracy?"

John took a sip of his coffee, if only to have something to do with his hands, and it was slightly less terrible hot. Brains had given him a thorough, if unsolicited introduction to the moral failings of diner coffee, starting with the old, stale Robusta grounds lingering tastelessly in the calcium-build up and flat water of the mass-market brewer. "Maybe. It's pretty close to the office, and my boss took me here a few months ago. We come sometimes after work."

Something about the statement made Robin squint. "You have a boss?"

"Doesn't everyone?"

"Well, yeah," said Robin, "but most don't take their minions out to dinner on the regular."

"It's not formal or anything. Just pancakes. And coffee." Empirical measurements would show no greater mysteries of the universe were solved in the span of time it took to eat an order of a short stack and sides. Admittedly it didn't sound like much when he said it out loud. But it was.

"I didn't know you had a job," said Robin.

The irony of the statement was bizarre. If anyone was going to have the accusation leveled against him, it should have been Robin. "I work for Brains," said John, carefully skirting the bigger picture of working at HQ, a low-level clerk getting by on family connections, the inescapable fact that he was, after all, working for Dad indirectly, a level removed, another office in a different part of the building, probably an innocuous detail in a world of family-owned business—fortunes passing from father to son—but he was sitting across from Robin Locke, heir to his company, and it wasn't hypothetical. John's throat felt suddenly tight. "In the lab."

"Brains?"

"Dr. Hackenbacker. Hiram Hackenbacker."

"And he buys you coffee?"

"Decaf," said John and added, "which, apparently, is sacrilege. He nearly passed out when I added Reddi-wip." Cream had been another of Gordon's suggestions, any excuse to up the calorie intake in his big brother's day, and maybe John hadn't been paying attention when Gordon had been listing off acceptable percentages of butterfat content.

"So if your boss likes good coffee," said Robin, a dubious glance at the cup in front of him, "why does he take you  _here_?"

"He's English, and he has this thing with diners. The All-American lure of the classic pancake platter. Or something. And he doesn't drink the coffee." John could feel himself detach from his body, float away far enough to witness himself from a distance, a strange dissociation from the man whose ability to make himself understood was beginning to wobble, the conversation devolving into the faintest rabbit trail about his boss's preferred choice of beverage. "He brings his own tea and just asks for hot water. And milk. Two percent." He had the wild, fleeting notion this might have all been on purpose, this deliberate spiral away from the original subject into the smallest of small talk, but that was probably giving Robin too much credit and—"Did you reschedule?"

Robin was appropriately mystified by the hairpin turn in the conversation. "Reschedule?"

Ideally John should have left a longer pause between the subjects. "The meeting. With Branson Davis."

Robin grimaced at the memory. "That ship may have sailed." The twitch of his fingers betrayed him. "I'm not sure there's a graceful return from revisiting breakfast in front of Branson Davis. And Jeff Tracy."

"Dad's been space sick," John started, not completely sure why he was volunteering the information, "and Uncle Lee threw up in a press conference once. They'd scheduled it a little too soon after touchdown."

Robin clearly didn't know where he was going with this. "Fun anecdote."

"What I'm saying is—it doesn't have to be the end. Dad's seen some stuff and he might—he  _would_  give you another chance."

"That's…nice, I guess," said Robin, "but I think it's probably better if we stick to admiring each other from afar." He finally reached for his coffee. "And besides, thermal protection systems are  _so_  last week."

"Is that what you were going to talk about?"

"I was going to talk about the core problems of traditional deflect-and-dissipate thermal protective systems in atmospheric reentry."

"Oh."

"I am all about epoxy novolac resin and fiberglass honeycomb these days."

"Are you?" The question was genuine.

"Well, it's my job, so…" Robin hesitated, "I try to be."

"It sounds interesting."

"My job?"

"The presentation."

Robin took a measured sip of his coffee. "I suppose self-perpetuating feedback structures have a certain charm to them."

"It just seems like a shame that no one's ever going to hear it." John knitted his fingers together to steady them. "Can I read it?"

"Come again?"

"The notes," said John. "For your presentation. It's the least I can do." And it really was. A negligible making of amends, the smallest gesture towards being anything other than indistinctly sorry.

Robin frowned. "Are you serious?"

"I'm very serious," said John. "Ask anyone."

Robin set his cup back on the saucer. "I guess I could put something together. Where do you want me to send it?"

That was a problem: a paper trail, the indelible digital stamp of ones and zeroes leading to his inbox, proof of a correspondence out of place among the other emails from family and work and the bi-monthly e-zine subscription of Feline Fancy Gordon had signed him up for as a joke. "Could you pass it to me in person?"

It was an odd question, John knew, but it couldn't be helped when the conversation was dwindling, and there wasn't time for an artless segue into the topic, not when he had to get home before someone made the connection he wasn't at the office, where he said he'd be, and Dad called Kyrano, perpetually ready to assemble a phalanx and comb the streets of LA for wayward Tracy children.

"Uh…sure." Robin turned the cup in the saucer. "I'm kinda busy this week, but you could come by the office on Friday. Or, I'll come down, anyway. To the lobby. Around seven?"

A foot in the door, a perfectly inoffensive reason to meet again, and John nodded, the gnawing in the pit of his stomach beginning again, because it wasn't all noble, not really, not when the Question remained, and the Secret, which Robin knew, when no one else did.

Not even Alan.


	12. Moth

The mess on Robin's desk had evolved: it was a city now, a paper metropolitan of avenues and white towers, reams of baby redwoods sacrificed for the empire's expansion—a small civilization advancing steadily outwards, over the lip of the desk and beyond—new stacks of paper, new cities rising from the untouched, feral plain. If Duncan had ever disapproved of sitting in chaos for the Friday reviews, he'd mercifully never said as much, maybe because he knew there was no helping the atrophy. He was seated in the chair by the desk now, framed in-between two stacks of papers, a notebook resting in his lap, a small, round pair of spectacles perched on the tip of his hook nose. He had a distant look to him, the great sage far above the mortal disarray, a mystic forsaking the world, transcending the madness of making order where there could be none.

"Robin," said Duncan without looking up from his notes, "is there a reason you're not listening?" He was only mildly vexed, the benign exasperation of a tutor failing to interest his ward, which wasn't much different from how things used to be.

Robin stretched in his chair, hoping the snarl in his back would work itself out. He'd heard there was a physiotherapist somewhere in the building, hired to indict the average office lemming of his crooked ways, the hunch in his shoulders, the long hours bent over a desk. "You think maybe we could take a breather?"

Duncan was momentarily distracted. "I suppose we—" he checked his watch, and Robin could see the calculations bludgeoning their way to the forefront, "—has it really been two hours?"

"Time flies when you're having fun." Robin leaned back in his chair, trying to think of a way to word the next part without sounding too hopeful. "You want to get some coffee or something? There's this new shop that just opened up down the street." The Has-Bean. Another shrine to the coffee deities, holy grounds for the pour-over acolytes fond of boho interiors and white tiles, wicker chairs and menu blackboards scrawled with needlessly complex variations on a cup of joe. The Seattle Boilerplate. Sumatran Widowmaker. The Black Death. "I thought maybe we could go and see the…" Robin trailed off because Duncan hadn't followed the tangent, hadn't  _wanted_ to follow the tangent, because—in all fairness—leaving the office to perambulate a few blocks over in search of a small, overpriced cup of coffee probably seemed like an overextension. "Or…we could order in?"

Duncan calmly turned a page in his notebook. "There's coffee in the office."

"But it wouldn't have been made with love."

"I'm not sure that's entirely relevant."

"Duncan," said Robin, peering at him, "it's almost as if you don't _want_  to complicate your life with organic, single-origin beans from a micro-lot in Kenya."

"I don't."

"Then perhaps I could interest you in the more fruit-forward bevy from our Himalayan co-op: air-pressed, steam-cleaned and slow-brewed in waters blessed by the village shaman?"

Robin had clearly crossed a line somewhere because Duncan took off his spectacles, folding them deliberately in his hands to give him his full attention. "You've never been interested in artisanal coffee, Robin."

"How do you know that?"

"I can safely make the assumption."

Fair enough. The man had seen Robin put Skittles in his breakfast yoghurt, so any pretense of aspiring to greater culinary heights had probably been abandoned. "Maybe I just haven't given it a fair shake."

"Robin," said Duncan, pausing intentionally, "what's this about?"

"It's not about anything. It's just coffee. The fuel for corporate America, and we're part of the machine—the, uh,  _cogs_  of the greased wheel of progress, devotees throwing ourselves beneath the juggernaut of commerce. So we should—I mean, we  _could_  take a moment to..." where was he going with this again? "...invest in the local infrastructure?"

Duncan was taking him in, appraising him in the way he always did to assess the damage. "Are you feeling all right?"

"I'm fine." Robin tried not to flinch under the look Duncan was giving him. "I'm just a little tired."

Apparently some part of that made sense, and Duncan unfolded his spectacles, setting them back on his nose. "Of course you're tired. You slept in the office."

That was demonstrably  _not_  where this was supposed to go. "Excuse me?"

"I don't imagine the couch is very comfortable."

There was a worrying calm to the statement, and Robin spared only a fleeting glance at the far end of the room and its neat arrangement of furniture: two armchairs, the coffee table, and the couch. "It's really more of a…postmodern interpretation of a couch."

"We've talked about this."

"Yeah, I know," Robin shrugged, not looking at him directly, "but it's not like it's every day." Just the days when going home was more of an effort than staying put. "It's a creative solution. I get to my desk faster. And I'm not contributing to carbon emissions."

"This isn't about traffic."

Robin pretended not to hear him. "Besides, I spent a few weeks trying to figure out how to fall asleep on that thing. You don't want all that effort to go to waste, do you?"

Duncan sighed, the deep exhale of a thousand silent forests. "That's not the kind of endeavor I'd ever want you to pursue."

"But at least you'll always know where to find me. That's good, right?" Robin tried to make the laugh sound easy. "It's like you said. It helps to have something. To be here." The carefully curated schedule, Duncan's liturgy of hours to keep time in a world where things only seemed to creep in petty pace from day to day. "So, to be clear—rain check on the coffee?"

The pivot was so obvious Robin wouldn't have gotten away with it if Duncan hadn't let him. There was an endlessly long pause before Duncan sighed again, shaking his head, the sharp line across his forehead smoothing out, and he relented, moving on, letting go so fast the drop to another subject was almost dizzying. "What exactly are you wearing?"

"Bottega Veneta." Bespoke. But the question was rhetorical, more of a pointed observation than anything else, and Robin's hand went self-consciously to his loosened tie. "Why?"

"I trust you're going to be wearing something more appropriate tonight," said Duncan. "The dinner is black tie."

"Technically, dinner jackets are midnight blue," said Robin, and lest it be misconstrued for mutiny, he added, "but I get what you're saying. Black tie. I'll break out the regimentals."

"May I suggest the Brioni?" It wasn't really a suggestion. Duncan must be worried if he was circling pedantics. "And I'd prefer it if you showed some restraint in your color choices over the next few weeks."

" _Oui, mon capitaine_ ," Robin gave him a snappy salute, "but let it be known that you're, like,  _totally_  harshing my vibe."

Duncan so rarely smiled. Amusement was more like an involuntary spasm of his jaw, but at least he looked halfway appeased. "Honestly, I'd rather cancel but it's been in the books for—well, for a very long time, and it's expected of you to go." He brought a hand up to massage his temple and he was quiet for a moment, gathering himself. "It's tradition, and tradition is important right now. People look to what came before. They want to be assured nothing has changed. And it  _hasn't_ , not really. We're the same as we've always been. The Summit is a chance to let them know this year has merely been a time to…" it took him a moment to land on the right word, " _reconfigure_  our internal structures. You understand, don't you?"

Robin felt the static crackle in his head, something knocking at the back of his skull, and he nodded.

"And I do know the prep for these events can be a bit tedious," Duncan went on, "but I just—I want you to be ready for any eventualities."

Eventualities. A year of them, and Duncan had been there from the beginning, walking him through protocol and mission statements, sitting through lunches and seminars and meetings in the argot of 'scalable ideas' and 'moving the needle'—a haze of schedules to learn, prime movers to know, business connections for Robin to make his own, and in the midst of the blurry distortion, a memory: the first day, Duncan showing him the office, installing him into the big, empty glass room twelve hundred feet above the ground, lingering in the doorway, unsure in a way he hadn't been since.  _Is there anything I can do for you, Robin?_

"Don't worry, Duncan. It's the Summit." Not even the Summit. Just the inaugural dinner, the unreasonably dull run-up to a week's worth of seminars. "I can handle a bunch of space nerds. And investors. Deep pockets, big egos. I'll fit right in."

Duncan looked slightly unhappy with the word choice. "I don't want you to 'handle' them. I want you to be non-descript."

"I'll barely make an impression."

"I assume the Tracys will be there."

"Well," said Robin, lingering on the dramatic pause, "can't throw a party without LA's  _crème de la crème_. And it's the kickoff for the biggest annual tech summit this side of Langley." As if Duncan didn't already know. As if the whole world didn't know the savviest tech-heads in the industry were about the descend upon the city in numbers so vast they would blot out the sun. Or at least make a dent in the local supply of pocket protectors. "I think they're morally obligated to have at least one family member in attendance."

Not Scott, if Robin had to guess. That guy probably spent his Fridays shirtless and shadow-boxing in front of a mirror. And John—well, John didn't fit into any previous understanding of the universe. Would he be there? This was his kind of thing, wasn't it? Perchance to mind-meld with the other twelfth-level intellects? But if that had been the plan, why would he agree to meet today? Wouldn't Locke Labs be a bit of a detour for someone on their way to that kind of event? And why did Robin have to say  _Friday at seven_  when there wasn't actually room in the schedule for this kind of margin?

"Is that going to be a problem," Duncan ventured, a little more carefully than usual, "considering how things turned out the last time?"

Right. Duncan still believed there had been a 'last time', the hypothetical night out on the town, when Scott had too many strawberry daiquiris and John cut a rug on the dance floor, jazz hands in all their glory.

Duncan would want to know about tonight. And Robin would tell him. Eventually. Just  _later_ , when he was sure Wednesday hadn't been part of some sleep-deprived hallucination, wherein his astral form had floated down to Sully's and found John Tracy in a window booth, the essence of business casual—grey sweater, white collar shirt—looking preppy and distant and possibly like he'd strayed from a photoshoot for the upcoming issue of Forbes' Thirty under Thirty.

Robin slipped his hand inside his jacket pocket, fingers wrapping around the slender thumb drive. He didn't know how to explain this—whatever  _this_  was—whatever phrase could identify the strange happening of John wanting a copy of the notes to a rather bland presentation. For what? A little light reading before bed? God knows the technicalities of ablation sensors were enough to put anyone to sleep. 

"I'm not sure I can stay away from them, Duncan. I am but a moth to their luminous glow."

The head tilt. "Robin."

"I mean, this  _is_  Jeff Tracy we're talking about.  _The_  Jeff Tracy. Mars Mission Tracy. The Man with the Golden Shuttle. The original psychonaut, tripping out in the cosmos long before I dropped my first acid." Robin stopped for breath. "You know, he founded the Celestia Scholarship to help kids get to space. Or the Academy. And that's not counting the many internship opportunities available at Tracy Tech."

Robin could hear it, the way he was starting to sound like a recruitment pamphlet for the other side, and Duncan patiently tried to understand the digression. "What are you saying?"

"I'm saying—it's not going to be a problem, Duncan. I know my place. I'm the proverbial Charlie Gordon of the science community. No one's inviting me for my witty repartee on drag coefficients. I'm just there for the snacks." It was routine by now, wasn't it? Rituals forming over the countless events they'd been to over the year: dress up, look nice, shake a few hands, have a few drinks, inevitably get roped into a conversation about the cobalt deficit with some geriatric named Vlad. "Which means I'm not talking to any Tracy at the Summit." He put a hand to his heart, solemn, austere, and willed Duncan to believe it. "I promise."


	13. Loose Ends

In hindsight, being early to a meeting with Robin was probably a mistake, seeing as there had been no precedent for him ever being on time. John had left work early, but clearly there had been some glaring inaccuracy in his estimated time of arrival, a paranoid overcorrection for traffic that hadn't been all that bad. So here he was, appearing at Locke Labs half an hour before the meeting, an excessive margin even for him, and if Robin's previous appearances were anything to go by, John probably had another twenty minutes tacked on to the initial wait. A sum total of fifty minutes to loiter suspiciously outside the building, in plain view of cameras and security guards, and the last thing he needed right now was a spot inspection of his motives.

Not that he looked terribly out of place among the other dressed-down varieties of button-up shirts and casual slacks trickling out of the building at a pace one would expect on a Friday evening.

The plaza was mostly empty, a fountain in its middle, minimalistic, a slight dip in the black stone, a furrow where the water drifted to a glassy pool, a tranquil centerpiece no one stopped to contemplate. John glanced at his watch, even though he immediately felt that was too obvious a gesture, the kind of discernable nervous edge he shouldn't be showing, and  _calm down_ , John. There wasn't anything to worry about. He'd taken the necessary precautions to get here. No company car. No tracked location. He'd hailed a cab far enough away from the office, a yellow taxi slipping into the anonymity of thousands like it in the business district. He'd gotten off a few blocks short of his destination, tipped the driver slightly above the average, a gratuity ordinary enough to be forgotten, and walked the final stretch, a brisk stroll in the cooling air, almost pleasant if not for his reason for being here.

He needed to find someplace to wait, quiet, out of the way, with a clear view of the entrance. If this place was anything like Tracy HQ, there would be a café in the building, a lounge, a cafeteria, a myriad of options to comfortably anticipate the hour. Except waiting inside would mean having to go through some sort of front desk and be remembered by the relevant personnel, his face registered in a foreign system, and even though the possibility of someone going through the files to find him was exceptionally remote, it  _was_  a possibility, and a warning bell he couldn't muffle.

It felt too much like Harvard, when everything had been about the details, an endless orbiting of specifics, lies written down in ciphers so he could remember what he'd said and when he'd said it. It had just been easier to be vague: there was always a glut of excuses to pull from to explain any radio silence—projects and deadlines and classes meant no time for longer calls. No time for family. And that wasn't out of place. By all appearances, John was operating under optimal conditions, the kind of rigorous academic biome he'd always loved.

Supposedly he'd left it behind. Or as much as he could, anyway, without going through the handful of leftovers from Boston. There was a box sitting at the back of his closet—a box of textbooks, old class notes, the crimson Harvard flag—and buried somewhere in the pretense of school spirit was a notebook, small and spiral-bound: his book of ciphers. It wasn't something he liked to imagine—Kyrano going from room to room in his empty apartment, boxing up the remains of What Could Have Been. The man been dispatched to tie up any loose ends, to jump the necessary bureaucratic hoops on John's behalf.

At least the hoops were easy when he came in the name of Tracy.

And there were no loose ends.

John had been careful of that.

Dad hadn't ever used the word 'dealer', but it was there all the same, a vague hedging around the concept of John having someone to sell him uppers and the bright promise of tomorrow.

A middleman.

An enterprising young undergrad with a pressing need for fast cash.

Michael Atwin, specifically.

Mikey to his family. Mike to his friends, of which there were many.  _ **M.A.**_  to John, the name scaled back to anonymity. Mike Atwin: the white, middle class, relatively dense social climber hoping to make it into the higher echelons of wealth and influence, just upper crust enough to be directly adjacent to the have-mores in Harvard, a vantage point where he could see his regular pocket change wasn't going to cut it with the big dogs on campus. Presumably it had been a small step from there to selling his Adderall medication.

John almost didn't even have to try to get his hands on Mike's information. High school transcripts, admission essay, on-file medical records, home address, family, friends, friends of friends, most frequented locations, political leanings, online handles, banking details, credit cards, social security number—all diligently compiled, codified. Like the good little peon that he was, Mike obsessively tagged himself in pictures, locations, updated his social accounts, hemorrhaged personal details without even meaning to. And everything else, all the other, more private indiscretions—the papers he'd plagiarized, the pills he'd hawked—every fraction of every detail had been filed away into the two encrypted hard drives in John's top desk drawer.

It was with some pride John had added to his collection, every night amending the files to fit the day's latest iteration of specifics. Towards the end, it'd been the last thing he'd checked before bed, carefully going through the coded files to assure himself everything was  _fine_  and  _as it should be_  and that he could—if the occasion called for it—finish off the cretin who had crawled into his path.

It was the kind of foresight Kyrano would have appreciated. Or at least, that's what John had told himself back then: that there had been an elegance to the scheduled drop-offs, the cash-only policy of the seasoned buyer. But it seemed…small now, somehow. The apartment. The desk. All the meticulous precautions that hadn't withstood the unknown variable of Gordon Tracy exploding  _ex nihilo_  onto the scene, gatecrashing a weekend that wasn't meant for him, and the Secret had come undone, leaking out around the seams like a bad wound, spreading to Gordon and Virgil, to Dad and Kyrano and the rest. Nine so far.

Robin made ten.

John felt the fluttery disquiet surge up in his chest again, the trapped bird, the erratic stagger of wings against his ribs. But  _how_  did Robin know? He had no connection to the family, to Harvard or anything else that made sense. John  _had_  to ask him, even if asking meant going back to Thursday, prying back the layers of what John had said to Robin, _about_ Robin—the only clear details of the night remaining, sharp fragments buried in the muddy recollection.

The sun was setting now.

The lampposts around the plaza perimeter lit up with a soft glow. John shoved his hands into his pockets in exaggeration of the casual, his brain politely beginning to contemplate the fastest escape routes when the glass doors of the building slid open and someone strolled out into the half-light.

A blue suit, inappropriately cobalt.

Robin. Early. Maybe a little too early to know what to do with himself, because he walked a few paces, stopping halfway to the fountain, and pushed back his sleeve to check the time, seeming to realize only then he wasn't wearing a watch. Habit, evidently. He hadn't been wearing one to Sully's either.

He didn't move, hesitating over nothing in particular, a natural lull wherein John should raise his hand and say something. It would be easier now. Wednesday had set up some sort of rapport, hadn't it? Or maybe calling it 'rapport' was a bit much. More like an assortment of topics they could comfortably broach, having established certain similar mundanities: that they both lived in LA and had jobs and drank coffee.

It took John a moment to remember how his legs worked, despite the fact that he could run a decent nine-minute mile if he was trying—sometime in the last few months, Scott and Gordon had banded together in unholy alliance to work the number down to seven before the end of the year—but all those weeks of training and boardwalk runs couldn't possibly improve the inelegant half-jog across the plaza to—"Robin!"

Robin looked up, startled enough to sidestep. "John? Is...is it seven already?"

John had come to a halt a few feet from him, toeing some imaginary boundary. "No, I'm early. It didn't take as long to get here as I thought it would."

Robin found something about the statement loosely amusing. "Not something you usually hear in LA."

"They've improved," said John, feeling himself tip into some kind of nervous prologue. "The traffic, I mean. They had a team of mathematicians working on the algorithm."

Robin couldn't reasonably be expected to follow that.

"There was an article," John added, as if that would somehow make things better, as if he hadn't just appeared from the shadows to belabor a point no one had asked him to make. "In  _Scientific American_."

"Ah."

"Last month's issue."

Robin nodded, maybe trying to understand what that had to do with anything. "I'll have to keep an eye out for it."

"So, what are you doing here?" John heard himself go on. It wasn't what he'd meant to lead with—apparently spontaneous monologues about traffic were his preferred soft open—but the question was out already, entirely redundant.

Puzzled, Robin spared a glance at his office, then back at John. "Do you mean that in the abstract sense? As in—why are any of us here?"

"No, I just meant...you're...also early."

"Oh. Yeah. Well. Duncan said I could take five, so I'm just getting some air."

"Who's Duncan?"

Robin took longer than necessary to come up with an answer. "My…uh, people. He's—he's difficult to explain. I've known him for a long time. Used to help me with my homework way back when, but now…" he let out a soft laugh, "now he's just a guy with a crappy job. Does a lot of troubleshooting."

"Sounds like Kyrano." It was a deliberate offering—a name for a name, not an exact parallel but the kind of dropped detail that would seem to say more than it did. Robin might take it for an equal trade. "The troubleshooting part, at least. He doesn't really like it when we end up in the papers." John paused, catching on the odd revelation for the first time. "Duncan helped you with your homework?"

"Not willingly, per say," said Robin airily. "Latin verbs aren't for everyone."

John couldn't fit Robin into any scenario involving a dead language. "I suppose not."

"You don't have anywhere else to be tonight?"

The segue was blunt enough to notice.

"Because I'm such a busy guy?"

"All part and parcel of the Tracy social calendar, isn't it? Parties to crash, people to see?"

Not counting last week's formal dinner, the last party John had been to wasn't something he cared to recall. Four drinks in under an hour might have been impressive, if it hadn't ended with his head in the kitchen sink. "Parties aren't really my thing." At least not the kind Robin was referring to. "Or people."

He hadn't meant for it to be funny, but Robin snorted. "Good to know." He slipped his hand into his jacket pocket and pulled out a slender case. "Guess you'll want to speed things along then."

He held it out.

It was a thumb drive, black, plain.

John took it mechanically, feeling vaguely ill at the progress. This was happening too fast. This was supposed to be the tail end of the exchange, when he'd worked his way through an excess of banalities, an icebreaker of titanic proportions that would make bringing up Thursday seem more trivial than it was. He'd been good at his once, bluffing his way through the trite necessities of conversation, coolly feigning ignorance when he'd run into Mike at the coffee shop a block from the Yard, trading the usual small talk of two strangers meeting in line. It had been a rush back then, stopping for a chat and holding all the cards: the incomparable high of having an idiot for a dealer.

"Granted," Robin was saying, gesturing at the thumb drive, "it starts off a little slow but just wait 'til you get to the part about cross-linking densities—that's when things get, like, totally bitchin'."

There was something incongruous about the statement. "Don't take this the wrong way, but that doesn't sound like something you'd be interested in."

"What are you talking about? It's aeronautics," Robin made finger guns at him, "we  _like_  to get high." It sounded like an off-kilter slogan, possibly a dig at something, but if he'd had meant anything by it, he was already clumsily reversing out with a grimace. "And that's just an expression."

Not any expression John had ever heard of. "Sure."

"And not in any way a reflection of the company or any subsidiary projects related to the name." Again, the same latent PR speak from before, breaching without any finesse. "Just, you know, so we're clear."

It was probably to Robin's benefit they were interrupted. A cat came ambling silently out of nowhere, the feline apparition round and portly and self-possessed, its steps more delicate than the rest of its shape would imply. It strolled up to Robin, giving him a perfunctory sniff before promenading over to John, taking a turn around his shiny oxfords, appraising the stranger. It meowed once, deciding John wasn't worth the effort, and carried on, strutting off towards the fountain, its nightly avocation undeterred.

It wasn't much of a disturbance, no more intrusive than a car horn going off in the distance, but enough to disrupt the momentum. John could almost hear the gears grinding to a halt, the conversation dying so abruptly he couldn't remember what he was trying to say.

Robin was gazing after the cat. " _Et tu_ , Mr. Tubbs?"

"You...know him?"

"He lives around here."

"I had a cat for a little while, last Christmas," John offered, not exactly sure what he was trying to accomplish with the admission. "It wasn't mine. I found it in the snow. Managed to track down the owners."

Robin almost smirked. " _John Tracy Saves Christmas_. Now that's a headline."

"I'd hardly call it that." Call it skipping out on family holidays because there weren't enough orange pills in the world to make Kansas bearable.

"Well, you saved Christmas for the cat. And the owners."

John shook his head. "It was just coincidence. I wasn't even supposed to be there." In Boston, taking a shortcut through the alley beyond his apartment building. He should have been back with the family, in the big house, turning off the smoke alarm when Grandma inevitably burned the cookies. He should have been languishing through an endless meal of assorted starches and watching Scott and Virgil's annual, only-slightly-serious post-dinner scuffle over the remote. He should have found Alan in a quiet moment to catch up, like the good big brother John still liked to pretend he was.

"So coincidence makes you less of a hero?"

"Yes. No." John stopped, confused. "I mean, I'm not a hero. It wasn't—it's not like I was out looking for charity cases."

Robin didn't seem too bothered by the semantics. "Well, I'm just glad the little orphan got her cat back."

"It was a family. No orphans."

"You sure? The presses love a good sob story."

"I'm sure."

Robin opened his mouth as if to say something, but decided against it, looking briefly away, hesitation in the taut line of his jaw. "Can I ask you something?"

John tensed instinctively, skipping to some terrible, imprecise assumption. "What?"

"Do you like it here?"

Whatever John had anticipated, it wasn't that.

"Does it feel like home to you?" A vague sweep of his hand. "LA, I mean."

John hadn't thought much about it. He was on a relatively short leash between work and home, with the occasional detour for a boardwalk jog with Scott. There wasn't much room in the schedule for the scenic route, even if John had wanted to take it. And it wasn't like he was expecting to be here at all, at this particular bend in the road. If things had gone according to plan, he'd have been a Harvard grad with a business degree and a keen interest in uppers—but they  _hadn't_ , and it was six months now living with Dad (like they were family again) and Scott (like they were kids again), and working with Brains—or working  _next to_  Brains, anyway—and some days John thought he might be finding his feet again. Cautiously, not anything approaching Gordon's scale for optimism, the effervescing grin on the other end of the line, but still. "Didn't you grow up here?" The deflection felt a bit cheap. "Isn't this your home?"

Robin looked away, slow to answer. "Kinda. I traveled a lot as a kid. I've been back for a year now and it…I don't…feel…" he trailed off. "I don't know. Maybe I'm doing it wrong. Maybe I just need to get out more, you know? See the sights?" The question was unsure. "I hear the aquarium's nice."

Robin was all tells, just like in the poker game, a balance tipping in John's favor, and maybe it was reflex to parry, the newly-buried instinct rising from its shallow grave. "How did you know?"

"About the aquarium?"

"About me." John could barely hear himself over the pulse in his ears. "About Harvard." Despite everything—despite wanting it to sound blasé and casual and like it didn't matter—like it was just another organic turn in the conversation—he faltered. "Before, you mentioned…"

"Oh." Even in the half-light, John could see Robin blush. "That. That was—you could call it a guess."

"A guess?"

"Yeah," Robin drew out the word, "I don't have my ear to the ground or anything, but I heard a rumor that you left. And there are only so many reasons for leaving that close to graduation."

But there  _were_  reasons—perfectly legitimate reasons, all within the realm of possibility, and Robin had taken a stab at the least likely? "You guessed?"

Robin had the decency to look a bit sheepish. "Yes?"

"And that's what people think of me?" The question was flat, mangled in its attempt to escape the voice box. "That I…"

"No, they think it was stress. That you burned out," said Robin, shrugging. "As far as anyone's concerned, you're aggressively boring." He seemed to recognize the insult and held up his hands disarmingly. "No offense."

John didn't know he'd tensed until the stiffness eased around his spine, a cold fist unclamping, and he felt dizzy. That was the general consensus? That he'd worked too hard? He hadn't wanted to think about the outside perspective, the hearsay in the void he'd left behind. Because he knew on some distant, esoteric level what it must look like—John Tracy snatched from the top of his game, the mysterious desertion of Jeff Tracy's son, slated for graduation, slated for brilliance and a bright future in his father's footsteps.

This was everything John had wanted, wasn't it? A clean finish, the end pared down to the bone, a negotiation on his terms. And Robin barely knowing he'd let slip a handful of details along the way. John could see a pattern in the parts, an upper hand should he need it. He swallowed, the thought sticking like a burr in his head, a knot in his throat.

Robin's phone must have gone off in his pocket, because he started and pulled it out, fiddling with the screen, almost apologetic. "I should probably take this."

"It doesn't feel like home."

"Huh?"

The knot loosened. "To answer your question." John gripped the thumb drive a little tighter. "It doesn't feel like home. Not yet, anyway. LA's not really what I'm used to. It's not home exactly, but—I forgot what home was, for a little while."

"How long is a little while?"

"Eighteen months."

Robin looked almost impressed. "Harvard must have really kicked your ass."

That was one way to look at it.

The phone went off again, the screen lighting up, a beacon for the world they had briefly forgotten, and Robin had to answer, turning slightly away, a brief, bracing exhale before the greeting. "Duncan!" The switch in posture was immediate. "Yeah. Yes. Yes, I know. I'm coming. I'm—" he cleared his throat, "I'm in the elevator right now."


	14. Fine

 

 

Scott should've known not to take the call. He was halfway through the hotel lobby when his phone went off, and it was Gordon, predictably, having a sixth sense for calling when least convenient. On principle, Scott should've shut off his phone on the way to the ballroom and soaked in the ambiance, the grand expanse of cool marble and lush carpets; should have enjoyed the way it was quiet in the loudest possible sense, the whisper of silky dresses, the murmur of guests in the fractured light of chandeliers. But, of course, he answered the phone because he'd somehow forgotten Gordon didn't call so much as launch into a lengthy diatribe of the soul.

"Have you met our father?" Gordon didn't have time for a gentler lead-in.

"That's a rhetorical question, yes?"

"He's all 'bunkbeds build character', even though we could  _totally_  have had our own rooms. Technically, we could have built another house  _next_  to our house, but no, that's not what we Tracys do. Tracys learn to share, because Tracys represent middle America. And middle America is the land of bunkbeds."

Scott wasn't sure what he'd done to deserve this. "Okay."

The exhale of disdain on the other end of the line was practically of Valley Girl proportions. "My point is—I want to be there. But Dad's being all, 'you have to plan these things, Gordon. You need an end goal and five-year strategy, O my child."

"What does this have to do with bunkbeds?"

"I'm  _saying_ ," the tone implied Scott was missing something very obvious, "Dad only pulls this we-are-Kansas crap when it's convenient. I could just call up the airline— _any_  airline—and drop our name and it's wheels-up in thirty. Orange juice and mini pretzels in first class. But that's not middle America enough for Dad. No, no. I have to go 'by the book' and 'follow the proper channels', which—by the way—take forever."

"I think that's Dad's way of saying you can come down any  _other_  weekend. There's the Summit this week, and he's been tapped to open the seminars on Wednesday. You know how he gets. He doesn't want any distractions."

"I'm not a distraction." A brief, soul-searching pause. "Okay maybe I am, but only the best kind. And more importantly, I'm just a few hours up the coast."

"I don't think playing hooky will win you any favors with Dad."

"It's college. You can skip a few lectures—hell, you can miss the entire year and just show up for exams, and no one even cares."

"Dad does."

"And here I thought he'd be happy knowing I was mildly interested in rocket science."

"Yeah, you sound real invested."

"I  _could be_  invested if someone had told me about this earlier."

"It's an annual thing, Gordon. Pretty sure you knew that. And you could have penciled it into your rigorous social calendar if it'd been a priority. You know you need to give Dad a heads-up on these things. He doesn't like surprises."

" _You_  were a surprise."

Scott snorted. " _I_  was a welcome course correction to the domestic paradigm." It was his turn to pause, partly to adjust his bowtie in the mirrored wall in the entrance, and partly to give himself time to figure out whatever the hell Gordon was trying to say through the deluge of tangentially related information. "Is there a point to all this?"

"It's just…I'm  _so_  bored."

"You don't say."

"And you and John are in LA and doing stuff."

"Stuff?"

"And I'm stuck here solving word problems about chi-square tests and contingency tables. When's that ever going to be helpful in life?"

"You're doing stats homework on a Friday night?"

The silence on the other end was telling.

"Willingly?"

"I guess I just didn't feel like doing anything else. Where are you?"

"Hotel lobby. The Estelle. Nice place."

"So…how's John?"

And there it was, the reason for this entire prologue. "He's fine. You talked to him, didn't you?"

"Yeah. And he said he's fine too."

"So there's your answer."

"You know I'm never going to trust any of you ever again when you say you're fine."

"Is that so?"

"Abso-fucking-lutley. Oh, I'm  _fine_ , Gordon. We're all  _just_   _fine_. The air force is fine. My serious addiction to Adderall is fine. My recent brush with death is  _even better_."

"You feeling okay there, little brother?"

"I'm fine."

Scott could hear a pen drumming absently on the table.

"It was just the  _way_  he said it," Gordon started up again, softer. "And he's been a little quiet this week. More than usual. So I thought I'd ask. Make sure I'm getting the whole picture. And you're going to tell me he's fine, right? Like, really fine? And not fine-until-you-find-him-passed-out-in-the-living-room-fine?"

That had taken some getting used to in the beginning, the new world order, Gordon checking in on John, and Scott being volunteered as on-site liaison. A relatively easy gig most days, because Scott didn't have much to add to the conversation. John was doing well. Or he had been, anyway. "If it helps, John's not even going to be here tonight. Dad's coming from the office. Kyrano too. Maybe Brains, if he remembers to leave the lab. But John's at home, probably vegging out to Stanley Kubrick as we speak."

"Ah." Gordon waited a beat before adding, "Going stag to the party, huh?"

Oh, sure,  _that's_  what squid boy picked up on? "Says the guy sitting in his dorm room."

"Low blow, dude."

"How about you bother someone else for a while? I'm sure Virgil would be happy to hear all the details of your wild night in."

"Virgil's just going to give me another lecture on why IPAs are definitively the better beer."

Scott was probably going to regret this, but—"What?"

Gordon cleared his throat, voice dropping into his best impression of their brother. "Gordon, look at this IPA. You know why the British beer is called India Pale Ale, Gordon? Because, Gordon, the Brits were colonizing everything they could and that included India. And the British would send beer over, and it got stale on the way. Tasted like rotten eggs and sour cream, Gordon. So they added more hops, Gordon.  _Doubled_  the hops. And the hops sustained the beer all the way to India, and the guys there started to like the taste and they went home and the brewers started making IPAs. Gordon."

"Look at that. You learned something."

"I'm telling you, Scotty—he's a changed man. Denver does things to you."

"Uh-huh."

"You don't sound worried."

"I'll do something when he starts growing his own hops. Look, Gordon—I'm about to walk into the ballroom, and when that happens, you know I'm going to get complimented. And I can't have you in my ear when I'm chatting someone up." Scott slowed, trying to put this in a way that Gordon would take as helpful. "Go call John again, if you're worried."

For a second, Scott thought he might protest, but there was only the slightest, petulant huff on the other end, a final concession. "Fine. I will. I'll stay in my shitty dorm room and call my brother."

"There's a good boy."


	15. Refrain

 

 

Jeff didn't want to be here. This came as a surprise to him, seeing as he was suitably dressed and waiting for Scott by the grand stairs of the hotel, a few paces short of the ballroom and slightly in the way of the arriving parties. This was usually a highlight of the year, a chance to meet up with old friends, colleagues Jeff never had the chance to see outside a conference room. It was Friday, so he'd gotten most of his work off the table. There was nothing out of place, and yet—he felt oddly on edge. He put a hand to his watch, the slim, gold Patek-Philippe, imagining he could feel the little machinations drumming over his skin, reminding him of the endless minutes until the night was over, and he'd be home, shrugging off his dinner jacket in the quiet, maybe pour himself a discreet nightcap and cast a weather eye on the news.

Or just stop by John's room to make sure he was all right.

John wasn't someone Jeff had ever needed to worry about. Virgil and Gordon had been the ones who'd needed the supervision: there was an alarming number of accidents from the hobbies they'd taken up and discarded in short succession—faceplanting off every imaginable surface by the house; racing bikes on homemade ramps; setting off fireworks under the ice on Gower's pond; unearthing old scooters in the junkyard and fixing them up well enough to jump the fence. Unsuccessfully, it should be noted. A failure Jeff had been made aware of by the sudden wearing of long-sleeved shirts in the heat of a Kansas summer. There were other attempts he'd only overheard, a dropped conversation in the hallway, a kind of solemn swearing to secrecy completely undermined by Gordon's clumsy attempts at keeping it. Jeff supposed he should be grateful his fourth son was a terrible liar.

And then there had been the revolving door of dead or dying animals in the house. God knows where they found them all. Baby birds fallen from their nest, pigeons found half-comatose under the neighbor's window. Even the baby deer that had to be surrendered to the authorities, even after Gordon had begged on his knees to keep it.

Where, Gordon? Where are we going to keep a baby deer?

In the garage, Dad.

Of course. The garage. Why didn't I think of that?

Really, Jeff shouldn't have been amazed by any of it, not when Scott had so graciously set the precedent for reckless wonder in the family. It wasn't too unreasonable for his little brothers to feel the need to live up to the least of his exploits. Except, of course, for John, who'd realized in his own way and time he wasn't inclined to follow in his big brother's footsteps. Generally, John had been the counterpoint to Scott's half-baked plans, politely pointing out it might not be the best idea to take the truck for a drive when he couldn't reach the pedals. It hadn't stopped Scott from trying, but at least John had been on hand to witness Scott back the pickup into a ditch.

There had been a few missteps on John's part—mostly misguided physics experiments, particularly those seeming to involve Newton's third law—but it had all been in the name of science, so Jeff couldn't really fault him for that.

John had always been self-actualized. Jeff would've liked to claim more of a hand in his success, but honestly, that kind of front-row enthusiasm wasn't something you could teach. He'd filled out all on his own, hitting every growth curve, acing every test, going above and beyond the expectations, gainfully humming along on a frequency only he could hear.

Lucy had worried about that—John's penchant for solitude—but then, she'd worried about all her boys, a different set of worries for each one: the patterns they made, the gaps left in their constellations; the possibility, however faint, that one might slip through the cracks somehow, unnoticed. Left behind. Which was absurd, Jeff had tried to reason with her.  _There's five of them, Lucy. Thick as thieves. What would be the chances? And how?_  If anything, John had wanted for more time alone, more space to think in a house that never seemed to quiet.

Jeff couldn't convince her otherwise. The worry never left, the same refrain surfacing at every parent-teach conference they'd attended—the opinion from above that John might benefit from putting down his books to 'redirect his social focus'. Jeff had bristled at the word choice back then, the thinly-veiled attempt at pop psychology, as if the teachers at Middlerock Elementary had been sent  _en masse_  to the nearest seminar on developmental aptitudes. As if some second-rate public school teacher could possibly have anything to say about his sons.

Admittedly, that had maybe been a bit harsh.

Ms. Miller had only been doing her job, shepherding little children into adolescence for the better part of two decades. Possibly her concerns hadn't been entirely without merit.

But it had struck a nerve.

 _Don't listen to her, Lucy. This is John we're talking about. Just look at him. He's fine. Above average. Always has been._  And besides, the criticism hadn't been specific. Nothing definite to go on, nothing quantifiably out of place. Look at his grades. Look at the goddamn attention to detail. Polite, well-liked, well-spoken. Maybe a bit on the quiet side, but when had that ever been a cause for concern? So he didn't have the same overt panache as the other boys, but that—surely it had been an asset, not a flaw. They way John went his own way, saw past the façade, immune to the various crazes that swept the halls of Middlerock Elementary. There had been no pining over silly slime or Keebees or Jimmy Seaward's enviable collection of novelty erasers. No, John had had his heart set on that astronaut trading card set from an obscure, independent press called  _Aerozine_ , which—John had informed him—wasn't  _just_  the name of the storable liquid fuel of hydrazine and unsymmetrical dihydrazine, but  _also_  a great pun for the weekly email blasts, which—by the way—would be arriving in Jeff's pristine inbox starting Monday. Because that was the address John had provided for his contact details, still being ten and not yet privy to his own email.

If that wasn't proof of the extraordinary, what was? Surely Lucy could see that. Surely  _anyone_  could. John was the exception, not the rule. And Jeff had been right, of course. Because he'd always been right when it came to his sons. Right to expect great things. To ask for more.

Jeff sighed.

And maybe that had been the problem in the first place. That John hadn't ever needed the extra push. Hadn't needed to be convinced to do anything. And the subtle hints Jeff had been dropping—he tried not to grimace at the thought. Perhaps not so subtle after all. The way he'd brought it up in conversation—Harvard, the consecrated grounds, the golden memory. To Scott or Virgil or Gordon it would've seemed the merest nod in that direction, a mild suggestion to consider or disregard. Just their old man trying to relive his glory days.

Excepting the fact that John wasn't Scott or Virgil or Gordon. He wouldn't protest in the same way, though he'd probably tried, offered up some small form of resistance to say he wanted something else. Something different. But Jeff hadn't heard him or he hadn't been listening because who would ever turn down a shot at the old crimson pride?

"You okay there, Dad?"

Jeff startled, turning to find Scott beside him, sharp in his crisp suit. "Scott. You made it. And only seven minutes late."

"Gordon's fault." Scott didn't seem to mind throwing his brother under the bus. "He told me to tell you he's filing a complaint with HR."

"Oh?"

"Something about an unfair exile to the borderlands."

Santa Barbara was hardly a barren waste. "You may inform your brother I'll happily contest the grievance."

"I told him you needed a long taxi before takeoff. He should have asked to come weeks ago."

And weeks ago Jeff might've said yes too, but after the story in the papers—however incorrect—he wanted to keep family appearances to a minimum, at least in the short term. Scott would be enough for tonight. Virgil would've done in a pinch, if Jeff had needed a backup plan that could fill out a suit. A cynical side of him might have considered Alan, the kind of blue-eyed innocence that covered a multitude of sins.

"And he wanted to know if John was all right."

Not unusual for Gordon to check in, comparing notes with Jeff and Scott and anyone else who'd passed a fleeting glance in John's direction. Brains would probably have been subjected to some inspired form of the first degree, if Gordon had known his number. The kind of tenacious, systematized approach Jeff had always hoped to instill in his children. Gratifying to know at least something had stuck. "Is there any reason for me to believe he isn't?"

Scott shrugged. "John's just been a bit out of it since the whole Branson thing. John's fine. Gordon's fine. And I,  _by the way_ , am spectacular."

"Glad to hear it."

"The little merman's just under the impression we're painting the town red without him."

"Mistaken impression, I'm sure."

"Indubitably. Kid's got a big imagination."

"It's not the first time he's tried to keep up with you two."

"You're still mad about the tree thing, aren't you?"

"Not what I was referring to, necessarily."

"You know, I'm not sure he  _didn't_  hit his head on the way down," Scott mused. "It would explain the personality."

Glibness of the delivery aside, Jeff had a very distinct memory of Scott coming through the door, arms full of a teary little brother, and dumping him on the couch like a sack of potatoes, all the while yelling about how he shouldn't have been following them in the first place. Then, still fuming, Scott had stalked over to the fridge and thrown open the door, loudly rummaging for an ice pack to slap on Gordon's shin to keep the goose egg from getting worse. Anger had always been easier to reach for.

That image of Scott—twelve years old, with Lee's ratty old baseball cap permanently glued to his head, and the book of magic tricks tucked under his arm—seemed suddenly more distant than ever. Jeff couldn't remember exactly when Scott had outgrown him, coming home from Winfeld for the summer, full of confidence, swaggering in big boots and some sort of drawl he'd picked up at the academy—one, it might be observed, he dropped as soon as Grandma gave him the patented eyebrow raise, after which he'd been all  _yes ma'am_  and  _of course, ma'am_  and  _can I help you set the table?_  Back to his old self, back to good-natured ribbing about how everyone looked like little ants from up here, and are you sure you've always been this short, pops? Because, you know, osteoporosis is a thing. At which point in time, Jeff had felt it prudent to remind him sleeping in the garage was always an option.

"Scott," said Jeff, "I haven't forgotten all the hours you put in around the house."

Scott squinted at him. "Beg pardon?"

"Helping with homework. Giving up your Fridays to walk your brothers to practice."

For all his accolades, Scott was remarkably bad at accepting them. "Oh, sure. John's really been loving the Little League. Granted he's a bit older than the other kids, but his pitch is really coming along."

"I mean it."

Scott's grin was slow, smugly understanding. "Oh, I see. It's the nerves, isn't it? Remember, Dad—you've done this before. And they're more scared of you than you are of them. You'll be fine." Scott had his hands up, already backing away towards the ballroom doors, absconding from any immediate penalties for his irreverence. "Now, Jeff, I know the press makes you jumpy, but you got this. Knock 'em dead."

**Author's Note:**

> I only made this account because Prelude thought I should give Ao3 a try. Not sure I'm convinced yet, but we'll see.


End file.
